reformatting a disk for windows98

[cj]

Joel Bryan Juliano wrote:
> On 8/12/07, *Brian Beattie* <beattie at beattie-home.net 
> <mailto:beattie at beattie-home.net>> wrote:
>
>     On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 22:44 -0500, Linda Hanigan wrote:
>     > I have an unused computer setting around that has unbuntu
>     installed on
>     > the hard drive. I replaced it with a newer and faster computer.
>     My son
>     > really wants to play his sisters old win98 games. Since I still
>     have a
>     > Win 98 CD for the computer I thought about reinstalling win 98
>     on it for
>     > him. Does anybody know what I have to do to reformat the drive as a
>     > vfat?
>     >  I assume boot from cd and run
>     > mkfs.vat /dev/hda
>
>     If you wipe out the partition table Win98 will install itself.
>
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=100 will zero out hte first 100
>     blocks
>     of the disk which should do it.
>
>
> You can also create a bootable DOS formatted floppy disk or bootable 
> DOS USB under Linux,
> you need to download the bootdisk images from bootdisk.com 
> <http://bootdisk.com>, or freedos.org <http://freedos.org>, usually 
> .EXE files are just zip files, that you can unzip them to obtain the 
> .IMG or .IMA files.
>
> For floppy, do
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024
> mkdosfs -I /dev/fd0
> dd if=DOS.IMG of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024
>
> For USB, you need to download the mbr package "sudo apt-get install mbr",
> then make sure your USB drives are unmounted before doing any operations.
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
> <re-plug USB><unmount every automatic mounts>
> mkisofs -I /dev/sda
> install-mbr --force /dev/sda
> fdisk /dev/sda (then create a new FAT partition, set it as bootable)
> <re-plug USB><unmount every automatic mounts>
> mkisofs -I /dev/sda1
>
> mount the IMG file into a directory, example /mnt/
> mount -o loop DOS.IMG /mnt
> then mount /dev/sda1
> cp -R /mnt/* /mount/disk/
> unmount everything.
>
>
>     >                     Linda
>     >
>     >
>     -- 
>     Brian Beattie   LFS12947 | "Honor isn't about making the right
>     choices.
>     beattie at beattie-home.net <mailto:beattie at beattie-home.net> | It's
>     about dealing with the consequences."
>     www.beattie-home.net <http://www.beattie-home.net>     | -- Midori
>     Koto
>
>
>
>     --
>     ubuntu-users mailing list
>     ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com <mailto:ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
>     Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
>     https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>
On some computers, you can set them to read a usb thumb drive as a hard 
disk. If your computer can do that, you would be able to install windows 
98 on a 1 (preferably 4 gig) thumbdrive and not have to worry about 
repartitioning. booting would take some time though.

But, like i said, your computers bios would have to support that, some 
dont (especially with old machines)

just some food for thought
--cj