There are bootable win98 SE ISOs out there, but because of forum rules I cannot link to them. Remember that only OEM versions of Win98 were bootable. Find one of those and burn it and you'll be all set.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-08-08, 23:25:

There are bootable win98 SE ISOs out there, but because of forum rules I cannot link to them. Remember that only OEM versions of Win98 were bootable. Find one of those and burn it and you'll be all set.

I've got a bootable SE ISO, and Ive burned it to a CD, but the computer won't actually read from the CD for whatever reason and let me actually set up.

It's not an issue with the ISO, as I've verified it with 86box, and my discs work. But I can't get the machine I want to install it on to boot from the disk.

Is the CD or drive dirty? I used to buy these cheap nesi/Toshiba drives, and Win2K wouldn't load everytime (and the drive was new). I seem to recall my original 98se disk booting, in fact I'm positive of it.

Maybe try a different drive.

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-08, 23:38:

Is the CD or drive dirty? I used to buy these cheap nesi/Toshiba drives, and Win2K wouldn't load everytime (and the drive was new). I seem to recall my original 98se disk booting, in fact I'm positive of it.

Maybe try a different drive.

It's not the drive, it reads the first edition Win98 installer just fine among other disks.

The disk themselves are also fine, they read without issue even in Win98 FE.

The point is drives and disks can be flakey/temperamental. Perhaps not the issue. Create a boot disk. Then go tontown

Some drives will not work with CDs burned on certain other drives. The LG Blu Ray burner ODD in my main computer burns disks that often won't read in my old IDE CDROMS so I usually use ImgBurn with a Win98 or WinXP machine with an older IDE CD/DVDROM burner for disks that I want to use in another WinXP or Win98 machine.

Everything in life has a tolerance. There's no such thing as exact. What people mean is stinking close enough when they use the word. In industry, depending, slop factors abound. If everything was doggone perfect, there would never be a failure, until of course something utterly craps the bed.

Things roll of an assembly line. They spot check every now and then. And even with the checking there's a lower and upper tolerance. If your CD/dvd was checked, and was at the high side (some aspect of it), and your disk checked out on the low side, you may just wind up with a problem. As you are right now. Don't know for sure. Even with all the facts obtainable, we still may not know. Life is sometimes that sloppy/screwy.

There is no magic to burning a Windows 98 CD. The Windows 98 OEM ISO and Windows 98 Second Edition ISO should both be bootable.
These old bootable ISOs have an image of a floppy disk inside that is used for booting.
7-Zip can read the ISO and extract that floppy image out of it, if you want. You could then get a USB floppy drive and image your physical floppy disk using that disk image extracted from the CD.

I assume you are not using a SATA-IDE converter. I have not been able to boot through those, at least using Award BIOS.
CD-R instead of CD-RW would be worth trying too, even though CD-RW should work.

The SHA256SUM of my known-good Win98SE CD is 2adfb46df8a9c7bbd2f67bff07461cc2f9d9ec8e01f0e112cb044c9e3e62f607

Another way to do this :

a) Obtain or generate a Windows 98 SE bootable floppy image that has CDROM support and, ideally, make sure it works on your system (the recovery floppy you can create from Add/Remove Programs inan installed Windows 98 SE will do fine)
b) Use the floppy image in a CD authoring program to create a bootable (El-Torito) CD-ROM with the content of your current Windows 98SE CDROM on it and whatever else you feel might be useful (most important part is the win98 directory and its content).

When you boot from that CD on a system that supports booting from CD, the machine will actually boot from a simulated floppy drive that will be mapped to the bootable floppy image you obtained/created in step a.

I ran into a similar issue on my Pentium Pro box. Neat little workaround I was able to utilize was installing the PLOP bootloader. The BIOS never supported optical boot, and it may even support USB boot of the integrated USB 1.0 connectors. (Although I haven't tried) The Optical boot came in handy when I wanted to run things like partition manager and the like.
Making a bootable CD isn't too difficult if you're using something like Rufus and have a .img file of a boot disk with CDrom Drivers.
I also had to chuck my original IDE optical drive on my machine, and just run a newer SATA DVD drive with an IDE adaper. I would have liked to keep the original optical drive but it was becoming temperamental if it would work, even though it made all the sounds like it would work.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

Newer sata drives are limited in some ways. I can't remember which. For vintage horseing it:s a must to have an ide optical drive on hand.

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-09, 17:51:

Newer sata drives are limited in some ways. I can't remember which. For vintage horseing it:s a must to have an ide optical drive on hand.

The only issue I've noticed is that they don't have the analog audio out. Otherwise, it's been totally transparent. I don't know if I ever even hooked it up on my original machines back in the day anyway. Whatever came out of the soundblaster was fine, and I didn't use it as an audio CD player. Well, I did, but I used the front headphone jack.