I am currently have a machine with Win 98SE with the unofficial patches, however those were all installed seperately. I don't know if its possible to create a custom boot disk to install windows and its patches from 1 cd like its possible now with windows 7 & 10.
Installing a custom version of Dos is impossible iirc, unless you can reprogram the install diskettes from dos. Dos has the nasty feature that its only possible to install from diskettes due a code in the install which searches for install disk 1,2,3 etc. at a certain point requiring a disk change at some point during the installation.

On the subject of a custom windows 98 bootdisk I would also hesitate since I only have experience with a custom bootable disk I create for a USB for 1 machine (this includes its personalized drivers) and not a universal one suitable for multiple machines.

I've never heard of a tool like nLite for Win98. It IS possible to "slipstream" some hotfixes manually by extracting their files, but I'm not aware of any complete solution/application. That would be nice indeed...

Googling for <nlite for windows 98> turns up many hits, especially at MSFN.

So yes, "someone" has worked on a custom windows 98 install disk. Whether anything particularly worthwhile ever came of those efforts, I am not sure.

I remember trying to create a DOS install CD from the floppies and giving up in frustration. It's not enough to hex-edit the diskette labels in the installer. Something else is required.

well guys i appreciate all the replies, i was hoping someone had something working for this, as it is right now it takes about an hour and a half to install windows 98se, all the drivers, and unofficial SP3, not to mention its a pain trying to locate drivers for older hardware

Probably not exactly what you are looking for, but might lead in the right direction?

http://www.litepc.com/98lite.html

98lite is the equivalent of nLite's components tab, it simple allows you to remove extra junk from 98/98ME/ME OS's.

As for the custom ISO, is it doable. If I had like half a year free time, I would have made it. Because of various reasons, I actually have some knowledge of the 9x setup process, I can make the setup run at 1024x768x256, or make Win95 install in seconds. (with nothing working at the end 😀)

But sadly, that's not the hardest part, the hardest part is obtaining all the fixes/drivers/patches/official/unofficial updates/tweaks/etc. Some stuff is simply gone with no backups whatsoever.

And I do not know how to deal with DOS stuff, other than making it run the 9x setup program, and then getting the hell out of it!

lilkuz2005 wrote:

as it is right now it takes about an hour and a half to install windows 98se, all the drivers, and unofficial SP3, not to mention its a pain trying to locate drivers for older hardware

Is there some reason you are installing Windows 98SE so frequently?

In some cases it is useful to make an image of the hard drive once you have everything installed (there are many options for this: Macrium Reflect, Paragon, PING, and so on); then if you need to re-install, you can just restore the image. In theory, it's also possible to just copy the entire Windows directory to another drive and then restore the directory when you need it. (When re-formatting a drive, you'll also need to restore the boot sector, but that's easy.)

Installing 98SE is magical...at least for me. I could do it all day.

MrMateczko wrote:

98lite is the equivalent of nLite's components tab, it simple allows you to remove extra junk from 98/98ME/ME OS's. […]
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98lite is the equivalent of nLite's components tab, it simple allows you to remove extra junk from 98/98ME/ME OS's.

As for the custom ISO, is it doable. If I had like half a year free time, I would have made it. Because of various reasons, I actually have some knowledge of the 9x setup process, I can make the setup run at 1024x768x256, or make Win95 install in seconds. (with nothing working at the end 😀)

But sadly, that's not the hardest part, the hardest part is obtaining all the fixes/drivers/patches/official/unofficial updates/tweaks/etc. Some stuff is simply gone with no backups whatsoever.

And I do not know how to deal with DOS stuff, other than making it run the 9x setup program, and then getting the hell out of it!

What sort of DOS stuff are you having a problem dealing with? I grew up on it and lived and breathed it. Are you familiar with programming the Win 9X portion of the code for this 9X slipstream?

Errius wrote:

I remember trying to create a DOS install CD from the floppies and giving up in frustration. It's not enough to hex-edit the diskette labels in the installer. Something else is required.

They've managed to do this on this french website : http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … 30&f=22&t=16010 (this installs the french version of DOS 6.22 obviously)

MrMateczko wrote:

As for the custom ISO, is it doable. If I had like half a year free time, I would have made it. Because of various reasons, I actually have some knowledge of the 9x setup process, I can make the setup run at 1024x768x256, or make Win95 install in seconds. (with nothing working at the end 😀)

But sadly, that's not the hardest part, the hardest part is obtaining all the fixes/drivers/patches/official/unofficial updates/tweaks/etc. Some stuff is simply gone with no backups whatsoever.

And I do not know how to deal with DOS stuff, other than making it run the 9x setup program, and then getting the hell out of it!

Your knowledge might be useful (and this whole topic too) because I managed to install windows 98 without any boot media, just by using the network 😀 (and that's really awesome, no more problems with CD drive that can't read burned CD, no more lost media, faster transferts, etc ...)

i have a disk that install english dos 6.22 from CD and has win 3.11, it has a custom installer.

In answer of the original question, I think most people created image tools like ghost rather then slipstream as it is pretty basic OS when all said and done.
NT4 and above tended to get a bit funny as it has unique ID's created at install which goes a bit funny with images (the exact details I cant quite remember)
Win3x definitely can be copied into 1 folder and it will simply run all the way though, I thought I did this for DOS as well, but had trouble with it in more recent years so maybe not?

chinny22 wrote:

In answer of the original question, I think most people created image tools like ghost rather then slipstream as it is pretty basic OS when all said and done.
NT4 and above tended to get a bit funny as it has unique ID's created at install which goes a bit funny with images (the exact details I cant quite remember)
Win3x definitely can be copied into 1 folder and it will simply run all the way though, I thought I did this for DOS as well, but had trouble with it in more recent years so maybe not?

I'm working on making a USB bootable 98SE that transfers the OS to the Ramdrive and runs of it entirely. But will have to patch it so it works on P3 and P4 and for newer than P4 up to Z97.

At the moment just working on trying to patch it without commercial tools for over 512MB usage and possibly 1Gb usage for people with too much memory which should be enough for most 98SE games.

Yes at least where I work I ran across an older Windows 98SE Zip installer, it launchs norton ghost at startup, and from what I found out we had different CD's for each model of system that would deploy a prebuilt image for the more common systems, but the less common where done by hand. Windows 9x compared to today is really the wildwest

95DosBox wrote:

I'm working on making a USB bootable 98SE that transfers the OS to the Ramdrive and runs of it entirely. But will have to patch it so it works on P3 and P4 and for newer than P4 up to Z97.

At the moment just working on trying to patch it without commercial tools for over 512MB usage and possibly 1Gb usage for people with too much memory which should be enough for most 98SE games.

Again, the french website I've shown earlier might help you for this. They've made a windows 95 live CD right there ! http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=4394

MrMateczko wrote:

Installing 98SE is magical...at least for me. I could do it all day.

For some reason I've always preferred to do a full (re)installs with every new build. I did experiment with cloning for a while, but I ended up with using msbatch and using a ZIP disk with all the tweaks and updates I wanted.