Gateway 2000 Handbook 486 question

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Tue Feb 18 11:52:37 2003

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Tillman, Edward wrote:
> If your 486 is a DX, if you have 64Mb RAM, and if you had 20Mb of disk space
                                   16M (and we have done it with 8M)
> to spare (minimum requirements for W98, excepting W98SE), you can load W98
You can run full Win98, INCLUDING SE, with 16M.
You do NOT need 64M!!!
> in its "lite" or laptop version from bootable disks. W95's another matter
ANY version, not "lite", not "laptop".
> though -- You'd need a copy of DOS 5.0 or better up and running to load it.

NO. You need ANY DOS prompt that permits access to the CD-ROM (>= 3.10),
and can do it with a floppy boot from MS-DOS 7.00 or 7.10 (which you get
by doing a FORMAT A: /S of a floppy in a Windoze 95/98 machine)


> Either way, you'll also need to remember your formatting and partitioning:
> 98/85 run on FAT16, and are limited to 2GB partitions (98SE allows FAT32,
     ^^ "85"??
> and can hand 4TB partitions). Is/are your drive(s) compatible?

ALMOST.
FAT16 will run anything from 3.31 through ANY version of Windoze that can
be squeezed into 2G of disk space.

FAT32 started with Win95 OSR1. OSR1 was only available as an OEM version.


You can INSTALL to a FAT16 partition (95, 98), and then let Windoze
"convert" it to FAT32. Normally successfully, and hardly ever does a
total destruction of the drive/file contents. But it is ONE WAY.
MICROS~1 provides NO way to convert it back.

If you have >32M? RAM and a FAT16 partition, you could install NT4, (which
will gladly convert (ONE WAY) from FAT16 to NTFS.
Received on Tue Feb 18 2003 - 11:52:37 GMT