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I would like to make a Boot Disk and have it do the following: Run FDISK with switches, enable large disk support, Format the Hard-Drive, create a Folder on the C: drive, copy the files from a Win98 CD to the new Folder and automatically run Setup. This procedure below will work for Win98-98SE, with modifications you can set it up to work with Win95 and Millennium as well. Your first step is to download a program called GDISK. GDISK has switch options that FDISK does not provide. You can get GDISK at the following link or if you have Norton's Ghost it's on the CD. Click the Link: Software then the small folder to the left of the line: How-To Partitioning with Symantec's GDISK http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html You now need to make a Startup Disk from Control Panel_Add/Remove Programs_Startup Disk tab. When you finish leave the disk in the drive as we now need to modify it. From Windows Explorer click on the A: drive, Right click on the Ebd.cab and select View. While holding down the Ctrl key left click the Mscdex.exe, Restart.com, Sys.com, Format.com, Scandisk.exe, and Scandisk.ini files, right click any of these files and select Extract, Select your Floppy Drive and click OK. Next you will want to delete all the un-needed files on your Startup Disk **except** the following. When finished, you should only have the 12 files as listed below. Command.com Config.sys Format.com Himem.sys Io.sys Mscdex.exe Msdos.sys Oakcdrom.sys Restart.com Scandisk.exe Scandisk.ini Sys.com
Our next step is to Edit the Config.sys file. Right click the file and choose Open With, select Notepad and click OK. On the Edit menu click Select All then once again on the Edit menu select Delete. Copy/Paste the line below and save your changes. DEVICEHIGH=A:\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:mscd001
Next you will need the Autoexec.bat file. To make this easy so you don't have to create it yourself, you can download it here. Save the file to your Startup Disk.
You now need to unzip the GDISK.EXE file from your gdisk.zip download to your Startup Disk. Be sure to double check your Startup Disk for a file count, you should now have 14 files. We are now finished, but a little explaining is needed here with some important notes before we put this to use. 1. If you have a existing partition already on your drive you will see a "File Creation Error" message during the batch run, ignore this message as it is normal. 2. The GDISK switches setup in the Autoexec.bat file are structured to partition the drive as FAT32 and will use all the drive space as one drive. If you need to setup a drive less than 2GB or different partitions, please read the documentation in the gdisk.zip file and adjust the Setup.bat accordingly. 3. Be sure before starting this procedure you have your Win98 CD in your CD-ROM drive. 4. This procedure will work with most ATAPI CDROM's, if by chance the batch file does not work with your drive you will need to obtain the correct drivers and modify the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files. 5. If your CD-ROM drive letter is anything other than D: you will need to modify the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files accordingly. OK, I've read and checked everything, so how do I use this disk? Well it's quite simple, put this Automated Startup Disk in the A: drive and start your machine. OK fine it works well, but I'd like to understand how all this works, can you explain? Sure, I have nothing better to do than to sit here all day free of charge and do this.....just kidding <VBG>. See this link for a breakdown on how all this works. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Jan Chojnacki for his expertise with using Gdisk. With his help it is now possible to do this procedure with one reboot making it a far more elegant way of doing things. Check out Jan's site for Boot Disk, How-To's and more. http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html
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