Where did I put my Windows 98 boot disk?

I picked up the PC in the picture below for £20 from Facebook Marketplace. No idea what the specs were, but on the back was a label that said it had a 4.3GB hard drive in. As much as I love the noises old PCs make, spinning hard drives are SLOW and loud. 


I like to replace the drives with an SSDs or at least some kind of flash alternative. As long as you're not running a *NIX or NT based OS, then compact flash cards are a great and cheap option. Anything with a more advanced virtual memory management system usually degrades flash storage solutions really quickly. It's best to try and find a proper SSD if you plan on running one of those on your vintage computer. 

So I plug in an IDE to compact flash adapter, put the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE channel and turn the machine on. I'm greeted by a 192MB of RAM, Pentium II 266MHz PC. Not bad for £20 - and the case is in excellent condition. 


I need to install an operating system on the computer now, but I can't find my Windows 98 boot disk. I only had it a few weeks ago. I'm sure it will turn up - let's just make a new boot disk. Sounds easy enough right? How do you do that these days with Windows 10/Windows 11? 

I have a USB floppy disk drive which is still recognised on my Windows 11 laptop, so off I go and download a floppy disk image of a Windows 98 boot disk. So far so good. But how do you write it to the actual floppy? What utilities do people use?

Well I googled it thinking it would be easy and I'd find some free software out there that would just do the job. Well in the five minutes of looking, this turned out to be a little bit more complicated than I figured. WinImage was the first option that popped up but unfortunately this is payware and I'm a bit of a skinflint. Also - I couldn't actually get it to write anything. The option in the menu didn't do anything for me. I'm sure it's a great piece of software, but for my purposes it didn't fit the bill. 

The next piece of software I came across was PowerISO. I've heard and used the trial version of this before for other needs. This did allow me to write my boot disk and I'm currently installing Windows 98 on the compact flash card. But it got me thinking - surely there must be a free way of doing this? 

Casting my mind back to the good old days, there used to be a piece of software called Rawrite that I used for this exact purpose - allowing you to write disk images to floppy disk. So I googled it. I found a website with a version on but wasn't expecting much as it says it supports Windows 95 / NT 4.0 all the way through to Windows Server 2003. I downloaded it and gave it a shot. 


Thankfully it launched and it was able to see my USB floppy drive. I pointed it to my image file and clicked the Write button. The drive whirred into life and after a minute or so I had myself  fresh Windows 98 boot disk.

The versions of rawrite that I'd used before in the past were DOS versions and you had to specify everything manually. It's nice to have a GUI for this version. 

I'm pleased to say, I put it in the PC and it booted straight from the floppy, so I could create a partition using FDISK, format it and then install Windows. I have left the original drive in the PC but it's unplugged - just if I ever need it in the future. 

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