Removing oS

[fazeowns 0]

I installed win2k on a seperate partition and I love it... I have been using it for awhile now. I would like to get rid of Win98se which is on my primary partition. I want to reinstall win98 just to have for a couple of games but I want to rid of everything on win98 because of its great size of programs installed. I have the startup to default to win2000 without asking me.. What is the best way to go about ridding of my current installtion of win98?

[Atreyu 0]

Shoot theres a couple ways. It sounds like you have Win98 on C: and Win2k on D: (or somewhere else).

 

My first question is though... why are you gonna get rid of windows 98 only to install it again?

 

But to answer your question, when I want to get rid of my OS, i simply format the drive it's on. I never lose anything important cuz all my data is on a different drive. Formatting is usually the best way. Just be careful... since you have windows 98 on your C: drive, formatting will likely screw up your ability to boot into Windows 2000. This can be fixed however by going into Win2k setup, selecting the repair option, and tell it to repair the boot environment.

 

Another way, a bit more messy though... is to boot into Win2k, then just delete all windows 98 stuff, leaving Boot.ini and changing it so that Windows98 is not an option on the boot menu.

 

Sounds like youre gonna have a funky setup though. C: empty D: Windows 2k... where are you gonna put Windows 98 again? Why not just leave it? Seems to make more sense to me.

[fazeowns 0]

I want to remove win98 because there are alot of things installed on it.. software that is. When i started to uninstall a few apps and reboot it somehow corrupted my win2k and I had to repair it. I want to remove it to get as much space back on my C drive and than simple install a win98 for a couple games and thats it.. I think it would be much cleaner to format and start over with a clean install..

 

All i have to do is edit the boot.ini.. and I should boot to win2k fine?

[Atreyu 0]

Well which do you want to do? If you format you will lose boot.ini. You would then have to run the boot up repair option from the Win2k setup.

 

To be honest with you, if you MUST continue using 98, I would install Win2k on the C: drive, using FAT32, then Wind98 on the other partition. I would do this since Win2k is your main OS.

 

**note** This would not be good if you want to REALLY use Win2k and all it's security features.. since it relies on NTFS for all that.

 

However if you do not want to do this... then simply booting into win2k, and deleting everything on your c: drive (or just formatting it), followed by a setup repair for the boot environment (win2k setup), you should be good to go.

 

It's not pretty, but there's no "uninstall" option of an OS. It's either format, or try booting into the other one and deleting the old one. I have done this with Windows XP, however my setup was c:Win2k d:WinXP. When I was done with XP (which didnt take long cuz I'm not sure I like it yet), I simply booted into Win2k and deleted everything WinXP. Then I edited boot.ini to tell the computer that XP no longer existed. Since this works fine, it should also work fine for your situation. However the only problem you may face is the fact that on your c: drive (your bootable drive as of now) you have the OS that you want to delete. You could try this way, and if it screws things up... then format c:.. then run the Win2k repair utility in setup.

 

Also you may want to ask yourself, are those games SO important that you would go through all this just for them? Personally, there have been 2 games I couldnt play on Win2k. Istead of installing Win98 just for them, I figured, I benefit more from having such a great OS and not being able to play 2 games, than to use a crappy OS and play those two games. But hey, to each their own.

 

Thats all I can really tell ya. Have fun!