Hey Guys, need some help on how to extract the OS from a recovery CD. Here is my scenario:
Dell Product Recovery CD: Windows 98 SE

I would like to take the OS off of the CD. This is a full version of the OS, i would like to take it off of the CD and place it on another, reason being that the CD is damaged and i just want the CD without the Dell boot info and stuff.

Thanks for any help rendered.

it depends on how the cd works, when you put it in does it go through windows setup or does it launch norton ghost or similar and replace your hard drive contents with the image?

if it's an image of a hard disk then theres not really any way to get the install off it, but i guess you could use ghost (or whatever program you like) to repackage it..

you can do it with easy cd creator by saving it to your computer in .iso format

for windows 98se all he really needs is the 100meg win98 setup folder. Companies normally put the install folder onto the customers drive so he/she can install hardware and not need the 98 cd. That is unless he/she lost the windows cd and in that case the setup folder is not on the recovery cd.

Ok here is the layout of the CD, the windows 98 installation is contained on the DELL cd, but without the setup.exe files needed to start the installation as per normal. However the way the CD does the installation is that it boots into a dell custom install program, which does the installing for you, the only way to extract the files is to have a FAT32 partition which i dont have, the install extracts the files into a folder and then starts installation from that point.

depned what os it is

Windows 98 SE

I can speak a few things about restore CD's as i work with them constantly, and the quick answer is "no, its not worth your time"
Most of the time companies use Ghost (VAR) or PQ Drive Image. In which case you can extract the images that they have made onto your hard drive and use Ghost Exploere (or PQ equivilent) to browse the files.
I know that with Compaqs older restore CD's they have pkzip files that have been ecrypted as to not be opened by the lay person.
Either way, these images are images of the complete system, not the install files.
IE: You install windows XP... if you take a complete image of your hard drive it still would not compare to making a copy of the install CD.
For the most part, images are motherboard specific and moving that image to a new system will bring your blue screen ratio up close to 100%

After thinkign about it for a second... you can try to browse to the "windows/options/cabs" folder... that usually contains the windows 98 cabs (I forgot what OS we were dealing with).
Personally (and you may not have this option) i would just borrow a friends 98 CD and use the CD-Key from my computer...

I used a dell recovery cd for a while with random pc's by simply getting the boot disk and booting from them first. Although the cd I was using was a NT4 disk I dont know if your is the same, it is very simple so it would be worth a shot.

Some OS recovery disks have the setup files compressed in propietary formats like "win98.dat" that can only be decompressed with the "custom" install program you refer to.

One possible way to get to the OS installation files is to interrupt the install right where the "custom" setup ends and before the normal install is called. It depends on how the "custom" setup has been made however, some I have used have a routine to delete the files if the install is interrupted.

Also, as someone has already pointed out, the setup files in recovery CDs most of the time (if not always) have files suited for a particular hardware/brand and may not have all the drivers included in a "standard" OS installation CD. That's the case with the Windows 2000 Pro recovery CD we use at my work, it only works with a particular MB/BIOS/CPU combination, we have tried to use it on other systems (different brand, MB, and so on) and upon booting the "custom" setup inmediately replies "This Recovery CD can only be used on Ultra-PC systems!. Exiting setup"

The W2k files are not accesible from the CD since they are compressed into "win2ksp4.dat" (214Mb) and no decompression software we have tried recognizes the compression format of that file. It only gets decompressed by the "custom" setup routines that fires up upon booting. And, as I mentioned, it only seems to have drivers for that particular system. Everything we added later, we have to download the drivers from the Internet.

I must agree with you here, on the Recovery cd i use there is a file called win98se.pak, which i guess is the 98 os, but i have tried various programs to try to open it but to no avail, but will keep trying.