Here's a question. I was installing a network card into my roommate's PC yesterday. So I go into the properties of the device that needs the drivers installed, and I update it with the drivers I found on the web. Sure, that went fine. Then. oooohhh then. Then it asked me for the Win98 CD. I put it in, and it told me it couldn't find the file it was looking for. Stuff like "protman.dos". As I suspected, the files it wanted were all on there, but in the cab files.

My question: why did I have to go through the process of etracting all the files from the cab files and manually point the installation at that location? Why couldn't it see what was in the cab files? Isn't that what they're for?

I was just wondering if there were some sort of explanation for this.

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By the way, thanks to all of you who helped me on how to identify a PCI card, the programs you gave me worked great.

The last time I saw that happen was at a LAN party when someone was installing a network card and it asked for the disk. He asked for the Win98 disk, and I had mine with me, so I gave it to him.

Problem was, he was running 98SE and I handed him my 98-retail disk.

Was that your problem? OS version needs to be right.

In my experience, there are rare instances where for some reason Windows98 does not know the name of the cab file it wants. But more common is that it knows which cab file it wants, but for some reason, cannot find it.

Usually a quick search to find the cabs and then manually pointing it to the correct folder on the CD solved my problems. That is, back when I was using Win98.

I just copy the Win98 CD into a folder on my hard drive and change the registry to point to it. Since doing that I have not had any problems with it not being able to find certain files that it needs.

Yeah, I've always done that, too. Excellent old trick.

My experience is that it looks in the wrong cab for the file. Extracting the file from the correct cab and pointing it at that usually solved the problem for me. I came to the conclusion that Win98 (and 95) were packaged differently at different times. So despite the fact that two CDs were both 98SE, they would have different files in different places. I don't know if that's an OEM vs Retail difference or if it was just another way for Microsoft to screw with you.

Thanks guys, those are all good suggestions.

What you said about different versions of Win98 could be the case. I was using my own disc of Win98SE to install the thing.

I know there's different tricks you can use to make it use a certain directory, but I don't think this would have helped in this case. I think it just wasn't looking inside the cabs because it was asking for files that spanned several cab files, so it didn't seem to be looking inside those at all.

You could be right that it wasn't finding the ones it wanted, though. For instance, why is it that the first "netX.cab" is "net7.cab"? Then there's net8, net9., and net10. Why doesn't it start at net1?


But for future reference, what key do I need to edit to make Windows look in a folder on my disk drive for the cab files? And am I right in thinking that Win2LK already does something like this? I mean, I've never had to use my Win2K disc.

*edit*
one more thing. if this ever happens to me again, is there a way to search all the cab files for the file it needs? I couldn't find a way.

Along the same lines but avoiding a registry hack is to copy win98 to the hard disk before installing and running setup form there. All the cabs are loaded and the registry looks there by default.

Had to look for it since it's been a while since I did that.

HKey_Local_Machine/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Setup/Source Path

Then highlight Source Path, click on edit, then Modify then type in your new Value data being the exact location of the file.

Mine reads c:\win98CD in that key.

You'll notice that 1-6 are something other than net, and 11-whatever are something else again. That is, the cabs are numbered 1-whatever, but they logically split them up into categories.

Another advantage of copying the CD to the hard drive and installing from there (at least used to be) that you didn't have to have a DOS CD driver running for installations, which meant that Windows' CDROM driver installation was cleaner. Probably not a big deal now that you can boot off of the install CDs.

I used to copy the CD to the HD because it made the install quicker, on my system anyway.

It can even be the issue that I have seen every Windows 95 and 98 CD do this - nothing to do with packaging issues. I reckon it is purely a 'Microsoft being crap' issue. It gets worse when a single piece of hardware added requires several drivers which must be added in a certain order, and Windows installs them in the wrong order the first time around and then fails to find the drivers on the next pass and needs to be manually directed, only for a third pass (or even a fourth) to complete the install.

God I hate having to work with this inconsistent junk!

Akkkkkkkkkkk!!!

That's why I use Win2K. I've never experienced this kind of crap in the few years I've used it, and I'm glad to be rid of 98, despite the games I could play on it