600E Recovery without CD Drive

[Paul Pennington]

I'm trying to load the IBM Windows 98 Recovery CD for the 600E on mine, but I don't have a CD drive! I partitioned and formatted the drive on another computer, and copied all the files from the CD into a small partition.

Surprisingly, that all worked! I can boot the 600E with a Windows 98 startup disk: the drives and files on the hard disk show up just fine.

My problem is I don't know how to start the recovery process. Which file do I run to get the thing started?

[andyP]

You don't need to copy all files from the cd onto the hard drive, you actually only need the contents of the win98 folder.
What I always did was copy the folder win98 onto the hdd and put it back in the TP. Using a boot disc I made the hdd bootable. Boot the hard drive and go into the win98 folder and type setup - it installs.

[pkiff]

you actually only need the contents of the win98 folder.

He says he's got a Recovery CD, not a standard Win98 CD. Is the folder structure the same for the Recovery CDs?

[andyP]

you actually only need the contents of the win98 folder.

He says he's got a Recovery CD, not a standard Win98 CD. Is the folder structure the same for the Recovery CDs?

Sorry I overlooked the "recovery". The structure is totally different and it will only work from a cd drive as one of the tasks it runs is format.com, that would definitely not be of help.

[Paul Pennington]

Some of the later recovery CD's allow some choices such as "use existing partitions". I've never run a 600 recovery. Oh well. I'll just have to wait for my CD drive to get here. I bought a junker 600E for parts on eBay. Thanks for the replies.