hi!

i tryed to install windows 98 on my old pentium 2 pc using a old windows 98 cd but
when i have created dos partition and formated the hard drive, i get an error saying no cd driver found, i found
a website where i downloaded a win98se iso file.
now i wonder how to make a bootable cd because i can't boot from my original cd, i was creating a windows 98 boot floppy
could it be because i used a win98se floppy with a original win98 cd?

how do i make a win98se bootable cd, i could use some kind of guide ro make it a little easier.

any help would be thankful :) .

Personally I wouldn’t bother. If you absolutely have to then there are likely some guides out on the net. Could it be that the Se is just an upgrade disc? How/why are you creating a boot disc, the os installer should do all of it, and then you reboot into windows (though it has been 20 years since I probably used that).
You can run older operating systems in a virtual machine on a new computer, best of both worlds, save yourself the headaches.

Just burn the iso and tha'ts it.

You can find bootable CD images here:
https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html

Download the Win98SE_bootdisk.iso file, then burn that to a CD-ROM. Instructions on how to do so can be found here:
https://www.allbootdisks.com/cd_creation.html

Booting off that CD will get you to a DOS command prompt -- but you'll now have CD-ROM support loaded. You can then swap the boot CD with your Windows 98 install CD and start the setup program.

(Note: the boot disc images I linked do not contain a full operating system or any OS setup files -- they're just the recovery disks that Microsoft lets you freely create with older versions of Windows. So no issue with software piracy.)

Don't bother, if you have a bootable dos partition. Just make a dir and copy all the the files on the cd there and then run the setup.exe from DOS when you're done. I think it just needs the ".cab" files but it's been a while. The nice thing about this method is that your win98 install will never need the disc again.

I think the readme.txt on the root directory of the install cd has a section describing this.

whoa I didn't know you can get dos,95.98 free, is this legit though or illegal?

But then you won't get the authentic System Shock experience.

Please re-read the note at the end of my post. :-)

So...

Barring the fact that "bootable CD" is a phrase I thought I'd never hear again, did such a concept even intrinsically exist outside the rescue floppy disk?

The DOS virtual machine in Windows 98 is awesome but it can't run every DOS game. You'll need to drop into DOS mode for those. Configuring a PCI sound card for the DOS mode in Window 98 can be a little difficult for someone who just wants to play games. You'll likely need to tweak some config files. There are guides, I believe PhilscomputerLab has some nice ones and there is always the knowledgeable retro computing crew at vogons marvin subforum.

www.philscomputerlab.com
https://www.vogons.org/

The Soundblaster Live is nice for EAX under Windows but it's sb emulation in DOS mode is pretty poor. If you want play a lot of DOS games in DOS mode on that Pentium 3, I'd definitely suggest picking up a PCI sound card with hardware OPL3. Cards based on Yamaha DS-XG and ESS Solo chipsets are nice. Your Pentium 2 laptop might even have one built in. What's the model?

Not the experience I had in 1999. While you can't get "classic" SB Pro music out of it (at least I don't know how), I could get a much better quality music in DOS games, something that was much closer to Roland than SB Pro. The trick was to select general Midi in setup programs instead of Sound Blaster. Choosing SB of any kind did indeed make the music sound horrible for some reason.

If you don't need the Adlib/ Soundblaster FM Synth or don't mind the low quality of its emulation and all your games are happy to run with the required emm386 memory manager, it can be an okay card for DOS.

An added wrinkle though is that since the Soundblaster 16 is emulated under DOS, you can't slow your machine down below the minimum system requirements of the soundblaster live card without risking breaking the sound. The Soundblaster Live Value requires at least a Pentium 133.

If your CPU is a "reasonable" specification (1GHz+ Pentium III) then DOSBox
offers pretty good Soundblaster emulation, and MIDI quality can be greatly improved by using BASSMIDI (though now discontinued) with a high-quality soundfont.