New MB, old HD's

[engrbill47]

I have a problem that the THG guys may be able to help me with. My wife's computer was a 233 mHz K6 on an ASUS board w/ INTEL chipset. Since her machine was freezing up, I decided to upgrade her to a 1.6 gHz Duron on a MSI mini ATX board w/ VIA chipset(400 mHz capable witjh 266 mHz memory chips installed). At first boot, the system went through all the checks and then "stuck" ( the little cherron on the bottom below the Win98 logo just keeps moving left to right) on the WIN98 startup screen. I understand that this is because the old HD's (and the WIN98 op sys) have INTEL drivers on them and the new MB does not recognize them. Is there any way to install the via drivers w/o reformating her C drive? I really hate copying all of her data files from the C drive to the D drive. The new steup has a CD R/RW and the inevitable 1.4 meg floppy drive. I've got all the installed software that she started with, but she would really dislike loosing her email address book and email from our grandson. Can anyone help? I have since discovered that the cooling fan on her old PS was frozen and that was the root cause of her system freezing up. I can put the old system back together to copy her data file if necessary.

 

[o1die]

I would reinstall the old motherboard. When booting, go into the control panel>system>device manager>system devices; remove all devices one by one except the keyboard and mouse. Then power down, reinstall the new motherboard, and let windows 98 reload the new drivers for the new motherboard. Otherwise, if this is too much trouble for you, you can get a second hardrive to use as the boot device. Make the new drive master, the old hardrive as slave, and format and reload the new drivers on the new drive only. The old drive should be accessable as a second drive, provided you use the same version of windows.

 

[Crashman]

Good news, the Intel drivers don't conflict with anything. Here's what I'd do to get your configuration straight:
1.) Hit F8 at the instant your computer tries to read the hard drive for bootup, that will bring up a screen that offers to allow you to boot in safe mode. Boot in safe mode.
2.) Remove all devices in Device Manager (except Primary and Secondary IDE controller which you can't remove, you still remove the parent device).
3.) Insert your Windows 98CD and reboot. I'll assume your BIOS is set to boot from CD first.
4.) You'll get a fairly shortly timed message asking if you want to boot from the hard drive or the CD-ROM, boot to the CD.
5.) Run Settup, and if it tries to install Windows to an alternative location (such as C:\Windows.000), change the directory back to C:\Windows.

Your computer will overwrite the old windows files without changing the program files. It will automatically detect and configure all your hardware that it has drivers for. I'd stick with the default chipset drivers, etc.

6.) Windows will boot normally when it's finished installing, but you'll have to instal any drivers that aren't part of the Win98 package, such as some video card, modem, and sound card drivers.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[engrbill47]

Thank you, Crashman!