Bill Cunningham wrote:

I have a CD copy of 98se and it doesn't boot.

Many original Windows 95 / 98 CD's are not bootable. I think only
retail CD's will boot, but OEM CD's (such as "System Builder") do not.

Are there any cabinet files that would contain mscdec.exe and
some generic ms-dos driver? I'm not quite sure how to boot this
CD since it's not bootable. It's just a copy.

As has been mentioned, you can go to bootdisk.com, or (what I do when
installing win-98) is to connect the hard drive (that you are installing
to) to another machine that is up-and-running and format the drive (and
make it bootable, with DOS, which you can only do if you're doing this
with the drive connected to a win-98/me computer).

Then copy the entire CD to some directory on the drive. I will do this
for as much software as I can (Office 2000, drivers, browsers, other
apps, etc). When I've loaded the hard drive with as much software that
I need or can find, I'll remove the drive and install it in the
destination computer and then boot that computer. It will boot into
dos, at which point I can run the windows setup from the directory where
I installed the win-98 CD image.

Do you have at least one computer that is already running windows 98?
Are you able to connect the target hard drive to that computer? If the
answer to both is yes, then you won't need to make a bootable CD or
floppy.