upgrading 100PCs w/ win95 to win98

ghost is better for different PCs! Use ghost first and then Win98 will check hardware.

Unfortunately, the problem is fairly complex and will depend upon the rest of your environment. Is each PC entirely different? or do you have 20 or this model, 15 of that model, 30 of x model etc? If you do have some significant commonalities you may want to look at the disk image option. However, this will not preserve any of the previous settings.

I'm assuming there is a network involved? If so, what is the server OS? If it is NT and you are using SMS you could use this to perform your upgrades. If it is NetWare 4.11 or greater take a look at ZenWorks. These would require some configuration to setup but would aid in this process significantly.

There are a couple of other products which are desinged to aid in OS upgrades. I don't remember the exact names and I think they were more suited toward migrating to NT workstation from 95/98. These would probably cost you a bit though.

If you don't have any of these tools currently or don't see much future use for them you may want to consider the low te

Most imaging such as ghost will install the exact drivers and motherboard resources on each pc. This is BAD!!!Motherboard resources will not be changed by win98 and will eventually cause the system to have problems such as fatal errors and more... Iwould rec. running a script file to each machine.

Catargorize all PC'S by name brand and see what systems are similar in hardware and disk
drives,I would try to script install with scsi,and a ghosting with the ide drives.Looking for options and ideas is okay yet I feel that the inevitable will beto schedule a certain number of PC's to upgrade to minimize your down time.

I would setup your initial image file on your first PC (disregard the brand) and get things the way you want. Ghost the disk to another disk (save your first disk as a master). Boot up with the second disk in safe mode and remove the majority of the items in device manager. Boot up with your master disk and your safe mode cleaned disk as a slave. Create your Ghost image file from the second drive and use it for your roll-out. When you copy the image to the various PCs you will get a cleaner detection of hardware. No system hangs due to video issues and things like that. We did this on a 400+ PC rollout of WIN95B and Office97. It worked great. We also burned the image file to a CD and used it by booting the User PC with a WIN98 boot disk, loaded the CDrom drivers and then ran ghost. The copy of 600+ MB took about 8 minutes.

Good Luck

Save yourself alot of blood, sweat and tears. Do not upgrade at all. Do a fresh install of Win98. Go through the first part of Win98 setup(up until the first time it restarts the computer.) Do not let the system boot back up. Take a ghost imageof the system at this point. This image will have a Windows 98 install before HW detection, so it does not matter what system configuration you ghost it to. Download this image to one each of your other systems. The first time you boot up to thisimage Win98 will detect the HW on that system and set itself up accordingly. You can then take a new image for each of type of system as you get them configured. Keep each image on your network for those times when a quick reimaged is less expensive than troubleshooting and it almost always is! Of course you will have to back up personal files and setting for each user, but it is better than living with an upgraded system that handles resources horribly!

Combine answers 5 and 6. Do your initial setup from a scratch install that you have working and stable, including all your standard applications. I have blown away every upgrade I have ever done except one to cure instability caused by old .dlls anddrivers.

Install one PC of Windows98 and copy later the harddisk of the first PC to the other brand and let the Windows98 detect the hardware.

The best way to do this is to build a master image. Install everything you want on it. Office, virus software, misc. apps, etc. After you are completely done make a ghost image of it. Install this ghost image on all the other machines. When booting them for the first time go into safe mode, then edit the registry and remove the ENUM key from the HKEY_local machine tree. THis is where all the hardware settings are kept. After removing the ENUM key reboot and the hardware will be detected,including all the motherboard hardware. This is your best bet. This will allow you to have to install all the apps only once and will allow you to do fresh installs of win98 as opposed to doing win95 to win98 upgrades which never work flawlessy long term. The method described above is who we do it at our company. It is fast, efficient and flawless. However you do it, DON'T do upgrades, do fresh installs. Experience has showed me this is the only way to go if you want things to run smoothly.

instal 98 on one box, and then install the Resource Kit Sampler on it. There is a module called Batch98. it allows you to create a custom install *.ini file that includes all of the install info, even some not included in the install suchas deleting the online services folder. it allows you to specify network settings, add registry entries, etc. All for free. The win98 install will run completely unattended and install all hardware and drivers necessary. this is best suited if your computers have different configurations. Otherwise, use ghost like the others have said. you can also modify the *.ini file directly if you don't want to make entirely new batch.ini's for each machine or manually reconfigure the networking.

Many good answers. However, #9 is my preference. Recently Y2Ked 800+ PC network.
1. upgrades are not a good option too many inherent problems with old OS

2. Ghost worked flawlessly

3. By editing registry (answer 9), each machine will detect its hardware as required

4. Have drivers immediately available for each type of machines

5. A network install of image is ok but humans need to be driving PC to prevent "Murphy" stuff

To go along with the very good answers given so far, take a look at the KnowledgeBase article Q186111 for a rundown of the setup switches that can be used.

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