a bug in win98se setup

[xkai]

consider the following conditions are true
1. your hard disk (1) only has a c: partition (2)with the exact size 4GiB (4096 MiB), and (3)the other spaces are unallocated
2. boot your pc from (4)win98/me startup disk (ebd) and install (5)98se oem (6)from cd

notice that the two conditions and the (six) key points bold must be true at the same time to meet this bug.

in this case, when file copy progress gets to 48%, the progress will stop about a minute and then setup suddenly prompts that setup cab files error. it looks like the cd is broken or dirty. usually, in most cases, this error will be occurred if your setup cd, cd-rom drive, hard disk, memory, data cable or power supply has problems. but after you solved these, this error still exists. most persons will not think this is a bug in win98se setup, because 95/98fe/me (all versions) and 98se retail versions (full/upgrade) don't have this strange bug. 98se oem en-us version also don't have this bug, but chinese simp/trad version have. I didn't test other language versions. by the way, if the above two conditions don't true at the same time, you can't meet this bug. for example, you boot your pc from 98se oem cd and then run setup.

when this bug occurs, eject win98 cd, and click ok. click browse in the following 'file not found' dialog box, you will see the label of your drive c: is unreadable. sometimes the drive label is ok, but this bug still exists.
the msdn retail version of 98se chinese hk also has this bug in file copy progress 3% when the above conditions are true.

[Windows315]

I feel bad for the people who tried to install 98se back then/later dates and came up with this error

[xkai]

in my additional tests today, to my surprise, i found many official win98 cd's have this bug! for example, japanese 98fe/se, korean 98fe oem, ... to solve this bug, you have to open the official iso, copy base*.cab to your hard disk and then replace these files with the ones on your hard disk. of course this changes none. but after you save the iso, the modified isos can be used to install 98 without any errors.

[xkai]

or, run setup with /c switch, which lets setup don't load smartdrv. this slows down setup but not much on modern pc's.

[dixieLH]

why would you even use 98 on "modern pc's" ?

[Fanta Shokata]

why would you even use 98 on "modern pc's" ?

The best PC's for Windows 98 are these with Pentium II/III CPU.

[Battler]

Windows 98, both First and Second Editions, ran just fine on my real Pentium 100 MHz with 32 MB RAM back 20 years ago.

[Fanta Shokata]

Windows 98, both First and Second Editions, ran just fine on my real Pentium 100 MHz with 32 MB RAM back 20 years ago.

With 98lite, it would run way better.

[Arnold0]

When I was a kid the first PC that I got was a 486dx2 66 with 12MB of ram, it ran Windows 98 and I remember it running just fine (It was collected from the dump, at the time modern PCs ran late Pentium IV CPUs I beleive). It was just annoying because the HDD was only 500MB so not a lot of space. To be fair it probably was slow and I just don't remember that, but it did run without issues.

As for the bug, I guess not a lot of people would actually encounter that. I have a few 4GB hard drives in my HDD collection, but they are not exactly 4096MB. So if you had a 4GB hard drive the partition was probably a little under or a little over that. And if you had a larger drive I guess you could encounter it if for some reason you wanted the system partition to be 4096MB but that was probably not commonly done I assume.
Still it's interesting to see the strange kind of issues that could happen back then.

[JustZisGuy]

Over all of the Win9x installations I have done over the years, I have run in to plenty of odd crashes/hangs/unexplainable errors.

One of the first things you learn is to ALWAYS copy the setup folder to the hard drive and install from the hard drive.

There are lots of things that can go wrong when installing from a CD-ROM, especially during the second stage setup when it can't find the CD any more because it has not loaded the protected mode driver yet.

CD-ROM disks, drives, and drivers can be very flaky sometimes, not to mention much slower. So copying to the hard drive greatly reduces the number of things that can go wrong.

Anyway, if this specific problem has been shown to be replicable, it would be interesting to narrow it down some more and find the real blame. But don't be too surprised if it is really something in your environment rather than the setup program itself.