Installing Windows 98 SE on old hardware

GeX

GeX

GeX

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I don't have any floppy discs, so can't make a bootable floppy as I would've done 20 years ago. The system doesn't have an optical drive at the moment, but I *think* I have an IDE CD drive somewhere.

Is there a way to set it up in another machine, then just transfer the drive over and it all be happy?

BUT, what do I install it on? I have various spare SATA HDDs and a convertor - but Windows 98 SE tops out at 137GiB iirc. Can I just create a 120GiB partition for it to use on a bigger drive, and it'll be happy?

What about SD card to IDE convertors, seem to be a good solution and go for about a fiver.
 
You can boot using a Windows 98SE CD and it'll give you the same options as the floppy e.g. setup "without using cdrom" etc. You can do your FDISKing from this menu as you would with a floppy. However get a third option to start windows 98 setup instead of having to type D: or E:\setup. Possibly not remember this 100% (even though I did it literally today!) but you can do the whole HDD prep and windows install without the floppy disk.

Basically don't go and buy a floppy drive for this!

The SD to IDE adapter will offer higher speeds but beware that CF to IDE is slightly preferred as it takes the constant read/write of being an OS storage device better than SD cards. I'm not sure this matters considering these PCs don't get used 24/7. Also, CF is "more compatible" with IDE than SD is, Not really sure what that means but less converting is needed. Maybe it is more likely to work with your PC?

Anyway you can't go around asking questions like this without telling us (me) about your PC!

Edit- I know you can put the setup files on your HDD manually and then run it, but you need to set up your HDD for Windows 98, i.e. having a "primary DOS Partition", which modern OSes don't use, so you might not be able to do that bit from another PC.
 
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I'll have a dig around for that IDE optical drive then :) My reason for asking about the SD to IDE rather than CF to IDE (which iirc is electrically the same, so the adaptors don't actually do much other than re-jig the wiring) is that I've got plenty of SD cards kicking about but not CF!

Thanks for the reply, and OK - a little about the retro PCs I have.

I have almost 3 in total, but only one case - so things get swapped around somewhat.

1 - Intel 430TX based, 233MMX with 32MiB EDO RAM, S3 ViRGE DX and dual Voodoo 2 in SLI config
2 - Abit BP6, dual Celeron366@550, 512MiB SDRAM, TNT M64
3 - Abit BX6 Rev 2, various CPUs for this but it's currently running a Celeron 2 600@1008 in a Gigabyte Slocket, 512MiB SDRAM and has an S3 AGP graphics card at the moment whilst I source the correct one for it (GeForce 256 DDR)

For some reason, one day - I decided to recreate the systems I had many years ago and this is my progress so far :D

(I also have a 16K, 48K and 128K ZX Spectrum along with the FPGA implementation Spectrum Next - but these are a bit more retro than the PCs!)

edit - https://photos.app.goo.gl/fYStnESwm7DnPU3TA some photos :)
 
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almoststew1990 said:
You can boot using a Windows 98SE CD and it'll give you the same options as the floppy e.g. setup "without using cdrom" etc. You can do your FDISKing from this menu as you would with a floppy. However get a third option to start windows 98 setup instead of having to type D: or E:\setup. Possibly not remember this 100% (even though I did it literally today!) but you can do the whole HDD prep and windows install without the floppy disk.

Basically don't go and buy a floppy drive for this!

The SD to IDE adapter will offer higher speeds but beware that CF to IDE is slightly preferred as it takes the constant read/write of being an OS storage device better than SD cards. I'm not sure this matters considering these PCs don't get used 24/7. Also, CF is "more compatible" with IDE than SD is, Not really sure what that means but less converting is needed. Maybe it is more likely to work with your PC?

Anyway you can't go around asking questions like this without telling us (me) about your PC!

Edit- I know you can put the setup files on your HDD manually and then run it, but you need to set up your HDD for Windows 98, i.e. having a "primary DOS Partition", which modern OSes don't use, so you might not be able to do that bit from another PC.
Click to expand...

In the end I found an IDE optical drive, burned a Win98SE disk and booted from it. Then installed it to a small SSD connected via a IDE->SATA jobby. It was working well, then it began to suffer with data corruption; now it won't boot. Guess I'll need to start again!
 
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