Has anyone ever heard of a "preserved forced install" of Win98? Apparently you can image a machine and install that image on any other machine, regardless of hardware differences and use a switch like:

c:\ setup \p f


Has anyone heard of this or tried it? There's a little more work to do ahead of time but that's a quick overview. I'm looking for some reading material before I attempt it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Dave

I don't have any comments on the switch given as I've never heard of it before nor do I know exactly in what manner it is to be used but a "universal" Windows installation was always possible if one were to delete everything under the ENUM key in the registry and then one makes an image before rebooting. This would in effect remove all hardware and force Windows to find and install every item listed in the Device Mangler. This trick used to be done for quick installs by swaping out hard drives, but adding the imaging twist should be just another way to do the same thing.

Items to delete are under this key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum]

Of course this would not work unless the CAB files were also included in the image from which Windows would then install the hardware specific to the machine it found itself on.

Could it be possible that your switch tells setup.exe to do something similar?

delete that ENUM key and make a disk image

I believe that's probably the case.

Yes, I would have to include the cab files in order for this to work. I was told that doing this would blow away the old registry keys and recretae them for the new hardware.

I've never attempted this before so it's a learning experience . To further complicate matters the old PC is setup with a dual boot (Win2k and Win98). Not sure if it will work or not with this twist but Win98 is the important O/S in this scenario, Win2k can always be installed afterwards.

"95/98/ME SETUP SWITCHES":
http://www.mdgx.com/last2.htm#SETUPSW

HTH

Nice . I guess I have some plans for this coming "geekend" lol .

Deleting whole HKLM\Enum regestry may cause some troubles, because it will remove some virtual devices, e.g.:
HKLM\Enum\Root\Processor_Update
HKLM\Enum\Root\SwEnum

You may try to bypass device detection (thing deleting SYSDM.CPL / SYSDETMG.DLL may work), did this for a bootable Windows 98 CD, and reinclude just before creating the image, however I never tried this final step will actually ever detect hardware again.