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Can't finish Windows 98 install on Sony Vaio

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First post, by Nucleartape

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I've got a Sony Vaio PCG-Z505R - One of the slim models that uses a PCMCIA CD-ROM Drive (In my case, a Sony PCGA-CD51), and a USB Floppy Drive.

At first the Oak CD-ROM driver didn't work. So to get Windows 98 to recognize the CD drive in the first place, I had to find the DOS driver for the drive and put it on the boot floppy, and modify CONFIG.SYS to recognize it. That worked, and I was able to get through about 75% of the installation.

That is, until I reached the part of the install where it boots from C: for the first time. At this point it needs to install a bunch of DLL files from the Windows 98 CD, but now suddenly it's saying the CD is not inserted. For the entire first part of this install, it had no problem with the CD-ROM Drive, and all of a sudden it's like it's not even installed?

There was a moment earlier in the install where it asked if I was using a PCMCIA drive to install Windows (which I am) but I don't have a valid driver disk that it will recognize so I just skipped this part. I'm not sure if this was the right thing to do, but I figured skipping it would keep it from switching the PCMCIA to 32 bit mode.

Any insight on this issue is helpful. Although I will say that this laptop is basically welded together, so removing the HDD and installing Windows on it using a different PC is not an option. I also can't find the system restore CD for this specific model. I looked everywhere. If anyone here has it, let me know!

Reply 1 of 3, by Meatball

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Since you are able to start Windows with CD-ROM support, format your C: drive. Then Create a C:\WINDOWS\CABS (or C:\CABS) directory. Copy *.* from D:\WIN98 to C:\WINDOWS\CABS (or C:\CABS). You no longer need the CD or floppy - remove both from the computer. Switch to the C:\WINDOWS\CABS (or C:\CABS) directory and then run setup.exe. You should be able to sail through to the end.

With the above said, at the point of copying all files from the CD to the HDD, I would remove the CD, but leave the floppy and reboot off of the floppy without CD support to avoid any PCMCIA complications. Finally, remove the floppy after running setup.exe.

Reply 2 of 3, by Nucleartape

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Meatball wrote on 2023-01-30, 23:26:

Since you are able to start Windows with CD-ROM support, format your C: drive. Then Create a C:\WINDOWS\CABS (or C:\CABS) directory. Copy *.* from D:\WIN98 to C:\WINDOWS\CABS (or C:\CABS).

Ok I'm stuck at this part because it seems nothing is working properly for me. I formatted C: in fdisk (just deleted whatever partition was there and replaced it with a primary DOS partition), but whenever I try mkdir I just get "Invalid Media Type Reading Drive C". Because my hard drive is 40GB, I tried fdisk again with large disk support off, and still no luck. I also tried formatting using Ontrack partitioning tool (which is what I used to format the drive for Win98 in the first place), but all that did was change the error from "Invalid Media Type Reading Drive C" to a much more generic "unable to create directory".

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