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COMPUTER BITS BY GREG SWAIN Windows 98: how to clean install the upgrade version You don’t have to install the Windows 98 upgrade over the top of the existing operating system. Here’s how to get rid of all those redundant files and do a clean install. I have a public confession to make. I was one of the first people to buy Windows 98. No, I didn’t line up at midnight out­side a Harvey Norman store – I wasn’t quite that desperate to try Bill’s latest and greatest – but I was on the phone to a software retailer the very next morning. My aim was to update my computer – a dual-boot Windows 95/Windows 3.11 system. The dual-boot exercise had long since outlived its usefulness and I wanted to reclaim as much hard disc space as I could by getting rid of the now obsolete Windows 3.11. In addition, I could gain extra drive space by running Win98’s FAT32 file system, something that wasn’t available on my old A version of Windows 95. Windows 98 also promised faster performance, a better interface, improved stability and a number of useful disc maintenance utilities that weren’t included in Win95. It also offers web integration and even includes FrontPage Express, an easyto-use HTML editing program that lets you create your own web pages. As well as Windows 98, I also ordered a copy of Norton Uninstall. An uninstall package is virtually a “must-have” item, particularly if you regularly install new software. Norton Uninstall, for example, can completely track a new installation. It then gives you the option of un­installing the new software and undoing any system changes (eg, to the registry) if you strike compatibility problems with the new program. You can only do this for one program at a time, however. Once you’ve finally instructed Norton Uninstall to accept an installation or you tell it to track a new installation, there’s no going back on changes to system files. OK, so I’ve allowed myself to digress and having committed that sin, I’ll digress further. The system that I wanted to upgrade used a Pentium 133 processor, two hard disc drives (1.3Mb & 1.6Gb) and 64Mb of RAM. The machine is a few years old now and I wanted to boost its performance without spending too much money If you have a Dell or Gateway computer, check the relevant company’s web site (www.dell.com.au or www.gw2k.com.au) for Windows 98 upgrade advice on your specific model. November 1998  81 Boot Floppy System Files Autoexec.bat A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001 /L:R /M:8 /V A:\SMARTDRV.EXE 2048 128 PROMPT $p$g Config.sys DEVICE=A:\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=A:\EMM386.EXE NOEMS DOS=HIGH,UMB LASTDRIVE=Z DEVICE=A:\SBIDE.SYS /D:MSCD001 /P:170,15 /V Fig.1: these are the autoexec.bat and config.sys files used on the boot floppy for my machine. The lines in italic type load the drivers for the CD-ROM drive. Check that the boot floppy works correctly and provides access to the CD-ROM drive before reformatting your hard disc drive. (well, actually I didn’t want to spend any money). Doin’ a deal To cut a long story short, I happened to have a spare Pentium mother­board while a mate had a spare 200MHz AMD K6 chip in his possession. Maaaaate! Yep, we did a deal – my spare moth­erboard plus a couple of other goodies for the K6. When I in­ stalled the K6 on the motherboard in my machine and reset the jumpers so that it ran at 200MHz, I was pleasantly surprised at the difference it made. I didn’t make any measurements but the dif­ference between a 200MHz K6 chip and a Pentium 133MHz processor is considerable. There was just one problem, if you could really call it that. During bootup, the system BIOS insisted that the new pro­cessor was an AMD K5 running at 133MHz – this despite the fact that the processor was really running at 200MHz. Clearly, the BIOS needed to be upgraded to correct this small annoyance and I decided to do just that before installing Windows 98. I’ll talk more about this later. Upgrade options Basically, you’ve got several options when it comes to installing the Windows 98 Upgrade. You can upgrade from Windows 3.1x or from Windows 95, or you can perform a new installation. In my case, I decided to completely trash my existing setup, reformat the drives and do a clean installation. This has several advantages. For start82  Silicon Chip ers, there are no redundant files left on your drives. Theoretically, what you wind up with is a fresh operating system without any of the unnecessary baggage left over from previous system installations and upgrades. A clean installation also provides the opportunity to re­format the disc drives. This not only ensures a couple of healthy drives but also automatically gets rid of any applications that are no longer used. Basically, you can use the new operat­ing system as an excuse to do a full system cleanup. What about the cons? Well, you do have to reinstall all your applications and replace any data files from backups. And that can be a bit tedious if you have to also install patches or updates for your applications. In my case, I simply backed up the files I wanted to keep using a borrowed portable ZIP drive. Boot floppy Because the Windows 98 Upgrade comes on a CD-ROM (you can order floppies if you wish), you must have your CD-ROM drive working in order to install it. And here’s the catch – if you reformat your hard drives, the CD-ROM drive will no longer work because there are no longer any driver files and no operating system to load them. The way around this problem is to make a boot floppy and copy real-mode (16-bit) driver files for your CD-ROM to it. You then create suitable autoexec.bat and config.sys files on this boot floppy, to load these drivers. For those that don’t know how to go about this, here’s the procedure. If you are running Windows 3.11, it’s dead easy. First, create a boot floppy (format a: /s/u) and copy your existing au­toexec.bat and config.sys files to it. Now edit these two files on the floppy disc to remove any unnecessary device driver com­mands, while leaving the lines for the CDROM drive intact. You need to keep mscdex.exe (the CD extension file) in autoexec.bat, plus the relevant CDROM driver file in config.sys. Don’t forget to change the paths in the command lines so that they now point to the root directory of the A: drive, since this is where the drivers will be copied. Next, copy mscdex.exe plus the relevant CD-ROM driver file to the boot floppy. A few other useful utilities can also be copied across at this time; eg, format.com, chkdsk.exe, scan­ disk.exe, attrib.exe and fdisk. exe. It’s also not a bad idea to add himem.sys, emm386.exe and smart­ drv.exe for memory management and to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to load these (smartdrv.exe will provide caching for the CD-ROM drive and speed up the installation). If you’re currently running Windows 95 the procedure is somewhat different because real-mode drivers for the CD-ROM are not normally part of the installation. Instead, you have to get them from the installation disc that came with the CD-ROM drive. The first step is to make a Windows 95 startup disc and you do this by double-clicking the Add/Remove Programs icon in Con­trol Panel, then clicking the Startup Disk tab and clicking the Create Disk button. When this has been done, make backup copies of your existing autoexec.bat and config.sys files, then restart the computer in DOS mode (click Start, Shut Down and choose “Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode?”). Once you’re at the DOS prompt, go to the root directory of the C: drive and install the DOS-mode CD drivers from the floppy disc supplied with the CD-ROM drive. This will copy all the necessary driver files to a directory on your hard disc and add the necessary command lines to auto­exec.bat and config.sys. You now copy the modified auto­ exec.bat and config.sys to your startup disc, along with the newly installed driver files. As before, you need Choosing the web-style interface for Windows Explorer gives it an updated look that’s more consistent with Internet Explorer’s interface. The Back, Forward and Up buttons make it easy to navigate between folders and you get a thumbnail preview of selected graphics and html files. Windows 98 offers improved disc maintenance utilities, including a Maintenance Wizard that lets you automatically schedule certain tasks. mscdex.exe plus the CD-ROM driver file. You can tell where these files are on the hard drive by looking at the paths in the command lines in autoexec.bat and config.sys. Don’t forget to edit these two files as before, to get rid of unnecessary device drivers and to point the CD-ROM command lines to the drivers on the floppy disc. Finally, reinstate your original config.sys and autoexec.bat files on the C: drive, then restart the machine using the boot floppy. Check that the CD-ROM drive works by inserting a CD-ROM, then typing Dir D: at the DOS prompt, where D: is the drive letter of your CD-ROM. If it works, you’re in business. Fig.1 shows the autoexec.bat and config.sys files used for my machine. Note that the switch /L:R in the mscdex.exe command line means that the CD-ROM drive will be drive R:. If you don’t have this switch, the CD-ROM will assume the next drive letter after the hard disc drive(s). Note that the driver file required for your particular CD-ROM drive will probably differ from that shown in Fig.1. Updating the BIOS OK, so what about that BIOS update, to improve support for the AMD K6 processor? This would have to be done next, before I reformatted the drives. The motherboard is an ASUS brand (model P/I-P55T2P4, to be exact) and their web site URL (www.asus.com) was easy to guess. In fact, this web site is excellent and I soon found the required BIOS update for my particular motherboard. Among the “fixes” listed for the update was support for the AMD K6 processor, so that was encouraging. As well as the BIOS update, I also downloaded a small utility (called pflash.exe) to flash the BIOS, plus a text file with the instructions. Now a BIOS update is quite easy to do but it’s not recom­mended for novices. If you make a mess of things, you can end up with a corrupted BIOS and a computer that won’t boot. The only way out of this sort of mess is to obtain a new BIOS chip from your supplier (or get them to re-flash the old chip if they have that capability). If you can’t get a new BIOS, you’re really left stranded right up that proverbial creek, without a paddle. The best advice here is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Anyway, back to the job at hand. Updating the BIOS on the ASUS motherboard first involves changing a jumper to enable the Flash BIOS programming capability. After that, you simply reboot the computer, run the pflash utility and follow the onscreen prompts to re-flash the BIOS. And that solved the problem. When I rebooted the machine, the BIOS now informed me that I had an AMD K6 running at 200MHz. Strangely enough, Windows 95 didn’t take to the BIOS upgrade and refused to load – this despite the fact that a previous BIOS update hadn’t fazed it. Installing Windows 98 With the BIOS upgrade under my belt, I reformatted both hard disc drives (format c: /v /u and format d: /v /u). The /u switch was included to ensure that the drives were formatted unconditionally. This destroys all existing data on the drives and ensures that they cannot be later unformatted. The Windows 98 installation itself is straightforward. The procedure is to boot from the floppy disc, logon to the Windows 98 CD, type “Setup” and press Enter. This starts the Setup Wiz­ard, after which you’re asked to enter the product key (found on the back of the disc sleeve). If you’re installing the Upgrade version, the November 1998  83 Windows 98 lets you can choose a web-style interface for your entire desktop. When you choose this option, the desktop icons appear as web-style hyperlinks which can be activated by a single click. Provided you’re connected to the Internet, the Windows Update feature provides a convenient means of keeping your system up to date. It’s accessed via the revamped Start menu. 84  Silicon Chip Setup Wizard also does an upgrade compliance check, which means that you must have a full version of either Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 on hand. During the compliance check, you’ll be asked to insert either your Windows 95 CD or Windows 3.1 discs. This can be a trifle annoying because, in the latter case, it wants to “see” no less than six floppy discs. Once the wizard is satisfied that you have a “full” version, it proceeds with the installation. I strongly recommend that you select the Custom option when the Setup options dialog box appears. This not only lets you add features that are not installed by default but also lets you delete space-consuming features that you don’t need. At some stage, you’ll also be directed to create a Startup disc so be sure to set aside a clean floppy disc before starting the in­stallation. Don’t imagine for a minute that the whole process will be finished while you have a cup of coffee – you’ll need several cups, in fact. Depending on the speed of your CD-ROM drive, the whole process can take the best part of an hour. During the installation, the Setup Wizard automatically restarts the comput­er several times and there’s a great deal of hard disc activity as the system identifies you hardware configuration and copies the driver files and other system files across. In my case, it all worked perfectly. Windows 98 correctly identified my Diamond Stealth video card, a nonPnP SoundBlaster 16 soundcard and a non-PnP Adaptec SCSI controller and installed the correct drivers for them. It also correctly identified an external modem plugged into COM2 and installed the drivers. By the way, if you are using nonPnP (legacy) expansion cards, be sure to reserve their IRQs in the system BIOS (if you have a PnP BIOS, that is) before installing Windows 98. This must be done for everything to work reliably. By reserving the legacy card IRQs in the BIOS, you let the operating system know which IRQs have already been assigned, thereby leaving it free to correctly assign the remaining IRQs to PnP cards. Further infor­mation on this subject can be found on page 8 of the June 1998 issue. Motherboard manufacturer Asus maintains an excellent web site that lets you easily find and download the latest BIOS updates for their products. What’s it like? Is Windows 98 worthwhile? In my opinion, yes, particularly if you’re currently running the “A” version of Windows 95 or if you have Windows 3.1x. Bear in mind, however, that you need plenty of disc space to install it (around 200Mb) and you should preferably have 32Mb of RAM or more, if your applications demand it. Yes, you can get away with 16Mb but 32Mb will noticeably improve the performance. Based on my own observations, the installation is very stable. The FAT32 converter works like a charm too and I managed to recover some worthwhile space by running the conversion. I’m not too sure about the one-click active desktop option as yet but I’m prepared A good uninstaller is almost a “must-have” item if you intend trying out lots of software. One such uninstaller is Norton Uninstall. It lets you backtrack on your last installation and can do registry clean-ups and lots of other things as well. to give it a go. It’s easy to switch back to the familiar double-click interface if you can’t take to it. Of course, not everyone will experience a hassle-free up­grade, especially if you elect to install over the top of an existing system. You might require an updated driver for your video card or sound card in order for them to work correctly with Windows 98, for example. Suitable updates can usually be down­loaded from the manufacturer’s web site. If you have a brand name computer, check the manufacturer’s web site for upgrade advice. For example, both Gateway and Dell offer Windows 98 upgrade advice on their web sites and even list drivers that you can down­ load to correct any problems with specific hardware items (eg, soundcards and video cards). SC November 1998  85