Upgrading from Win 98 to 98SE

well if you get that 98 from a new PC's that must be a full version of it ! because new PC's always come with full version OS !

You can't.
I just went through this tonight.
Any time you get past a certain point, it say's that you must use the upgrade CD. I tried tricking the system, and then inserting the upgrade/full CD, and the same thing happened.
Your only bets (that I konw of)are 1. get/find a 98SE upgrade cd, or pull another HD, set it as Cable Select, format the new one, do a fresh install of 98SE and use the current one to copy over all pertinant files. Then wipe out the other one. An upgrade will not over-write your old programs, however...they still will not work...so you will have to re-install some software.

Good luck...this can be p.i.t.a.

--Scott

There is a 98 to 98SE upgrade version.
I think it was selling for under $40 the last time I checked at www.bigclearance.com

I found the following information at this link;
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/win98_tips.htm#oem

Installing the OEM Version Over Win95
Submitted 9/5/98

Normally you can't install the OEM Version of Windows98 if you have an existing Win95 on your system.
To get around this problem:

1. Boot the PC with the Windows 95 Emergency Startup Disk to the MS-DOS prompt but make sure your CD ROM drivers are loaded on the disk and have access to the CD_ROM drive.
2. Run the MS-DOS editor EDIT and create a dummy file NTLDR (no extension) in the root dir C:\
3. In the Windows95 directory (usually C:\WINDOWS),rename the file WIN.COM.
4. Start the Windows 98 Setup with: SETUP.EXE /NTLDR
5. You will be prompted for the directory to load Windows98 into, by default if you already have Windows95 loaded and are upgrading, it will have c:\windows.000 makesure you change it to c:\windows or it will load Win98 in another directory.

These are instructions for upgrading an existing 95 install with a 98oem. It might work for 98 to 98SE.

Bob has lots of other good hints on his site.

If your PC is more than 2 years old, I would recommend that you wipe out the windows folder and start over from scratch again anyway.
Why? Windows picks up a lot of junk and gets bloated the more you run it.
You will get a noticable improvement in system speed if you perform a clean install rather than just a file upgrade.
The only downside is having to re-install most of your application programs as Windows won't know that they are there.

You can back-up and restore your favorites and e-mail folders so that you don't loose any critical data.

I usually don't encourage people to upgrade, most bugs that are reported come from upgrading.

However if you go through the Windows updates at Microsoft (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) you can download alot of the updated files. So you may not evenhave to do a upgrade.

Another way to do it is a bit risky. Is rename the win.ini file. And then Install using the Full Version of Windows98SE. During install the program looks for the INI file and then tells you that a OS is already installed. Ifit can't find it then it will proceed with the installed. I have done this 9 times. 7 times it worked and twice it didn't. When it did work I lost nothing, kept all the programs. The two times it didn't I had to do a clean install.

I hope this helps. Of course I would back up my hard drive prior to doing any updating or upgrading.

Best of Luck

Phill

Have you tried going to Windows Explorer > Cd Rom drive & running Setup from there .

The only way I have gotten it to work was to re-format my hard disk drive, so it would boot just the command prompt with CD-drivers and then do a fresh install.

Something else you might also want to try is to just boot to DOS (hit F8 as it starts booting) and run the install to overwrite the existing windows installation.

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