Upgrading from Win98SE

The Win98SE disk should contain Win98 upgrade plus all patches up to the second edition, so you should be able to skip the Win98 upgrade.

However, I'd think long and hard before upgrading any MS O/S. I highly recommend installing the O/S from scratch rather than upgrading. Windows has a bad habit of corrupt and bloated registries, and upgrading will not do anything to fix those problems. From previous upgrades, I've found that the ongoing problems I have had have made fresh installs well worth it.

Yup. All you have to do is stick the cd in, and press update.

It will update win95 and win98 both.

Hi I know it's not the answer you want to hear but ans.1 is correct get a complete version of win98 and do a clean install. What version of 95 do you have? If you Win95a you won't be able to upgrade to win98se, you would first have to upgrade to vers win98a. It's only because you don't have all of the patches for Win95 it must be a very old copy. You can try and get all of the patches first from Win Update then retry your Upgrade.But again I would do a fresh install if you want to save yourselfproblems in the future.
Dean

The first answer is correct. Unless you have Win95 OSR/2 or Win95b as it is sometimes called, you are out of luck. You would have to do the incremental upgrade. My suggestion is to blow everything away and install 98 from a clean machine. We upgraded all our 95b machines to 98SE and had all kinds of problems. The machines we did from clean PC's worked fine.

There are two types of Win98 upgrade disks available. There was the original upgrade from Win95 to Win98. Then there are the Win98 upgrades to Win98. It sounds as if you have the latter. You will not be able to upgrade from Win95 with that disk because it was intended to upgrade a Win98 to Win98SE. You will need to use either an upgrade disk designed to upgrade Win95 to Win98 and then use the Win98SE upgrade disk to get to SE, or purchase a full Win98SE disk. I believe you will be able to upgrade from either. In either case, Microsoft wants their licensing revenue for the copy of Win98 you want to put on your PC.

One thing you may want to try. (I've never tested this, so I'm not sure that it would work.) Download all of the Win95 upgrades available from Microsoft's website and install them on the Win95 box. Many of these updates include the code that went into Win98. This may upgrade enough files to get you through the error you are now running into. This could take some time, and it may or may not work.

The WIN98SE upgrade disk will upgrade any version of the WIN9X group, however you have to be very careful while you are doing it. The workaround is to make a directory inside your current windows directory similar to this: c:\windows\win98se\update\ Now before you do anything else, back this machine up. Copy the entire disk (most people only copy the win98 directory) to this directory. Explorer is great for this. The reason for the complete copy is the drivers. Some are hidden throughoutthe disk and why search for them. Once you have this completed use ctrl-alt-del and shut down everything except Explorer and Systray. Use the run command and run setup from the c:\windows\win98se\update directory. Putting the cd on the harddrive lets windows find any additional drivers that it may need at a later date and definately makes a restore a lot easier. Do not forget and make your boot disk!

Paul.

It sounds like you have Win95b so your in luck. Your error telling you that you must install a full is only it was unable to find the files on your hard drive telling it you already have a Windows OS. When doing the upgrade you may need to point it to the Windows directory C:\Windows so it can check your system and make sure you really have a MS OS installed.

Although, I agree upgrades especially from 95 (it must be older and used) can be nasty, I actually reinstall at least once every two years. You would be surprised on the performance increase. You really should consider formatting and doing it clean.

One way is buy a new Full 98SE CD (NO ME!!!) and go. Another way I have done it is to go ahead and make a full backup (younever know) and then format the entire hard drive. Boot on the floppy and start the Win98SE install from the upgrade CD, you will get the message of no OS was found you need to do a full install, BUT you can take the 98 upgrade CD out and put the old Windows 95 CD in and tell it to look back at itself. It will see the 95 files and allow you to continue the 98 install. (change the cd back)

By the way, the upgrade cd contains all of the files, drivers, cabs and the like for an install; it only needs to verify you have an OS prior to installing.

Good Luck
Steve

This question was closed by the author