If you have only SCSI CD's on your system you may hit problems, as not all SCSI controller drivers are supplied on the supplied Windows 98 STARTUP disk. However, most Adaptec SCSI cards should work with the drivers provided. Alternatively, some motherboard BIOS setups can be set to allow booting directly from a SCSI CD.
If you do hit problems try to
understand the follow advice:-
Before installing Windows get into DOS (by pressing F8) after the list of
devices are shown when booting, and choose MS-DOS Prompt.
Copy EDIT.COM from the CD onto a copy of the original startup disk supplied, together with the appropriate drivers for the SCSI Card and the SCSI CD. Always take a copy first, as if you make a mistake you can always take another copy and start again. If you don't, you may mess up the STARTUP disk and be prevented from easily installing Windows.
In order to add some driver files you may have to delete a few redundant drivers first (such as OAK, or ASPI in the case of IWill cards) to make space available. That's why you only use a copy, not the original floppy disk.
Check the readme file on the accompanying floppies or CD for the controller card for the names of the appropriate files.
In CONFIG.SYS (using EDIT.COM) you will probably need to add something like;
For the IWill 2936 Card:-
device = ADV3550.SYS
device = ADVANCD.SYS /D:MSCD001
For the Adaptec 2930 Card:-
device = ASPI8U2.SYS /D
device = ASPICD.SYS /D:ASPICD0
In both of the above cases the first
line tells the system to load a driver for the SCSI card, the second line adds a
CD-ROM driver. The /D: adds a system device name for the CD. This can be more or
less anything, but this same name must be used in AUTOEXEC.BAT in an extra line
, as follows:-
A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:ASPICD0 /M:12 /L:P
As stated above /D: tells the Microsoft
CD Extensions (MSCDEX) to use the named CD device (from config.sys).
/M: is buffering (optional) and /L: is the start drive letter (optional if you
want to keep it well clear of hard disk drive letters).
Once done, reboot, and you should see the CD-ROM driver appear when booting. If the startup disk still refuses to work because of confusion over drive letters, forget using the RAM Disk, and change to the CD drive letter ie P:, Change directory to WIN98 (cd WIN98) and run setup.