Waiting for win 98 to format an 8- gig hard drive..

[Ham]

The only thing lacking here is elevator music.

Why am I formatting an old hard drive with an old system, you ask..

well.. eventually. It will hold a (legitimate) copy of win 2000.

why an old hard drive, an old computer, and an old operating system, you ask...

Mainly because I haven't found any scanning software worth a damn. The very best and quickest seems to be something from HP that runs on software that runs best on win 2000..

well, the fastest anyway. There is probably commercial software that does far better..

[Ham]

Now I copy the entire setup disk from the cd rom because I very well know from previous experience, that if I set it up through the cd, the cd driver will NOT be installed. So the rest of the installation will not be worth a crap..

[Ham]

so.. with this wonderful setup disk, it doesn't matter if one installed a cdrom system file. when the setup restarts the system, it remarks out any cdrom drivers in config.sys and autoexec.bat.

then it can't find the rest of the files on the cdrom.

so the easiest solution is to copy all setup files to a physical drive that is actually present: drive c.

At least the setup program is well behaved. It will look for files in the same directory it started from, after the reboot.

[Ham]

If this ever helps somebody..

the only files you need from the setup disk are in the root.. which includes setup.exe and a few other files and programs, and the directories win98 and drivers (with their contents).

don't need the cdsamples or oldmsdos directories.. but you will find what you need to initially set up the hard drive in oldmsdos. There is fdisk and format. And xcopy- makes it far easier to copy the setup files to the hard drive..

[Jim]

Sounds like it's time for extreme measures..

[Ham]

Extreme, yes. The guy paying for all the scans bought an Epson scanner..

Until now the best I've had to work with was second hand HP hardware..

The software was nice, in the sense I could adjust the window that it would scan stuff.. but still slow. And it would not generate searchable pdf's.