I am reformatting the :C Drive on 4 computers. These computers are going out to remote locations. I would like to keep the Win98 disks at my office for fear they will be lost. I would like to place the Win98 installation files on the reformatted Hard Drives so if they want to add or remove Windows components, protocols, etc. then it will install the needed files straight from the hard drive. How do I place the Installation files on the Hard Drive so Windows knows to look in this location for whatever it may need?

The same place "regedit .com Changing the Location of Windows 95 or 98 Installation Files. If you need to change the drive and or path where Windows95 will look for it's installation files: Start Regedit Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Setup \ SourcePath Change the location from there

But, do how do i put these installation files on the computer? I have heard something about CAB files. How do i put these CAB files on my computer? Where should I put them? Once I do copy them, THEN do i edit the registry to point to these files?

Copy all the files in the Win98 Directory of your CD-ROM to a New Folder on your harddrive and run setup from there.

see here for copying cab's to HDD Format Reinstall

This is my favorite way to install windows. reformat and partition the drives with system files... copy mscdex.exe to the C: drive. Install CDROM drivers. restart. make directory in c: called win98 and copy *.* from the cdrom directory Win98 to the c:win98 directory. then be sure you are in the c:\win98 directory and type setup This will be smooth sailing unless you don't have CDROM drivers. Then you need to use the windows start up disk because that will install the Oak Technologies drivers which work 98% of the time unless you have a PackardHell machine. when you boot with the windows startup disk a RAM drive will be created on D: and if successful, your CDROM will be the E: drive. Do not reboot at this point, just copy down the e:win98 to c:win98 and run setup from c:win98... I hope that explained it well... good luck