'Bad Command or File Name' When Installing 98

Question

I'm trying to help my sister reinstall Windows 98. She has successfully formatted the hard drive. When restarting the computer with the cd-rom and start-up disk in place the cd-rom drivers seem to load and she gets to the A prompt. However, after typing D:\setup (where D is her cd-rom) she gets the error 'Bad Command or File Name'.    I had the same problem when I installed windows 98 and was able to get around it by first installing windows 95 which went right to the setup screen when the computer restarted. Then I had to install 98 over on top of 95. Unfortunately my sister does not have a 95 cd. Any helpful ideas would be appreciated.     Ed

Denny Denham · Answer

Ed P, If your sister has a Dell Recovery CD for 98, it does not use a startup floppy for installation. See this.

Ed P · Answer

Ed P,

If your sister has a Dell Recovery CD for 98, it does not use a startup floppy for installation. See this.

No, Denny she does not have that CD. However I noticed in that link it says to use

the command x : (where x indicates the letter of your CD-ROM drive)
cd win98
setup

that's different from what I told her to use. I'll get her to try that and see what happens.

Thanks,

Ed P

Doogie-224 · Answer

Ed P, I just got through installing Win 98 on a clean boot drive. None of the step by step guides had the correct info to do this. My son gave me some advice that worked. Boot from Win 98 boot floppy, assuming you have already partitioned and formatted the HDD, just before the A:\> prompt your CD drive letter should be listed, mine was E. type in E: after the A prompt and you should get this prompt, E:\> then type dir and this will open you CD directory. I had to repeat tihis process and open several folders or directories before I got the one that had setup.exe in it and at this point the install process started.  Doogie

Windows General

"Bad Command or File Name" When Installing 98

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