Win 98 Clean installation

[upec]

Hi

My friend have a SONY computer. The computer runs very slow because SONY installed a lot of garbage into the computer. I would like to do a clean installation for her. The system come with win 98 first edition and I would like to install win 98 second edition. The computer only come with a recovery CD which will just install everything back into the computer. I cannot find all the drivers for the computer since some are properitary and some are OEM does not work with regular driver. To avoid driver problems can I just copy all the driver from the current installation into the clean installation and how do I do it?

Thank.

 

[Guest]

The easiest way to do it is to find the drivers on the restore CD. Proprietary or not, they are still seperate files, and will usually be loaded into a directory with a name that won't give you a hint that there are drivers in there. My experience with Compaq, IBM, and Dell have shown that the drivers are there somwhere in a seperate folder, you just have to find them. The easiest way might be to look at the driver properties in device manager, look at which files it says the drivers are using and do a search on the restore disk for that name. Other than that the only way I could think of is to look in the INF file for all the files referenced in there.

 

[Kodiak]

hmm... in my humble experience with proprietary recovery CDs, drivers aren't only hidden, they're encrypted -- my IBM CD consists of bootup and 4 huge files -- compressed drivers,OS, everything. There's no way of getting the drivers from CD...
I had to experiment and get them off my existing installation, which didn't always work well.
If you can at all, make a backup of the system before you start. Norton Ghost has performed admirably for me and saved my, um, posterior hugely.
Otherwise, what can happen is that you'll think you have all the drivers,do an install, and discover that, of course, you DON'T have all the drivers... oopsie...🙁

Good luck!

 

[Bubba]

It has been my experience that you can usually go to your computer manufacturer's web site and find the model computer you have and they have all the individual drivers for download. I know this is the case with companies like Dell, Gateway, and IBM. I have not tried it with a Sony or even been to their site. Before trying to extract all these drivers from the disk, I would go to the sony web site and see if they have them.
This way you are sure to get the correct drivers for you exact hardware in that particular model computer.