I’ve spent the last several weeks working towards buying a new computer, and last night I finally got in touch with the guy who was supposed to build it. Here are the specs I was looking to purchase:
2.8 ghz CPU
Intel 875-PBZ motherboard
Nvidia TI-4600 128mb video card
Soundblaster Audigy 2
1GB PC 3200DDR RAM
160GB IDE hard drive, either Hitachi or Maxtor (though I’d prefer Western Digital)
Pioneer DVD-R, 8x I think
Here’s the kicker: the system needs to run Windows 98, preferably as part of a dual boot system with WinXP. This is critical since I have several old games (Doom2, Daggerfall, The Sims) which aren’t compatible or have serious problems under XP.
I found this thread which explained how to set up a dual boot system, which also contained this link to work around the memory issue with Win98. However, the guy called me back this morning to say it’s not gonna work, sorry, because the drivers for the hardware simply don’t exist for Win98.
I should point out that this guy hasn’t even tried to get Win98 running on this machine, not even after I gave him a clone of my current hard drive and instructions provided in the links above. (That didn’t stop him from cashing my check, though…)
So, what’s the deal? Am I screwed? Or do I need to find someone else? I know for sure that I’ve seen people running Win98 on a P4 system, including my brother who has a 1.7ghz computer with similar peripherals – his video card is even better than the one I was planning to get!
I’d also like to know how to locate a good computer tech in the Los Angeles area, someone who knows how to tinker with an older OS and not insist that I only do it “his way”…
Windows 98 should run ok, but it won’t recognize any ram over 512 MB, and some of your hardware may not function at full capacity. Drivers may also be difficult to find, especially for very new components. If possible, use Win 98SE, since that is a measurable improvment on the original 98.
Re: Western Digital drives. Unless things have changed in revent years, they’re the single most unreliable drives I’ve ever worked with. I’ve never had one that didn’t fail within a year or less. YMMV.
Intel’s web site has win98SE drivers for that motherboard. http://www.intel.com click on support and downloads, enter 875PBZ in the search box, select windows 98 OS in the pull down menu, and you’ll get an entire page of drivers.
You may have to partition the drive into smaller chunks, not sure. Other than that, the main difficulty is the memory thing and you’ve already got that figured out. You should be set.
PS - get a refund on your check. That took me all of about a minute to look up.
Also, you probably already know this, but your life will be a lot easier if you install 98 SE first, then XP. Another recommendation I would have is to copy the 98 disk to the hard drive and install it from there. That way if you ever need files it will just look on the hard drive instead of asking you for the CD.
Contrary to QED’s experience I’ve had little trouble with WD drives.
The only specific trouble areas you might have are getting 98se to play nice with a 160 gig drive and dealing with 1 gig of memory. I had to DL some little referenced OS patches from MS to get Win 98 to cooperate with my 80 gig unit a few years ago. Unless you are partitioning out a smaller section for 98 to play in, it might freak out if presented with 160 gig volume.
The other issue is the RAM . On some MB’s going over 512 megs RAM using 98 causes substantive system slowdowns, and 98 really can’t make truly efficient use use of much past 128 - 192 megs or so.
I have some sympathy for his position. Running 98 in that system will not be optimal and may have stability problems re the drive and RAM issues. You’d might be better off spending $ 100 or so for a well configured 1 gig class CPU box off Ebay and throwing 98 on that as a stand alone unit for gaming.
BTW providing him with “a clone of your hard drive” is pretty useless in terms of getting Win98 properly installed on a new box. He needs a Win 98Se OS install disk and the serial keycode to do this, and he really needs the 98se CD if he is installing the OS on a box that might gve 98 bellyaches. Cloning your 98 drive onto a partion, and then letting the old 98 install try to update itself in the new environment is the messiest and least stable way that 98 could possibly be installed on that sysem.
engineer_comp_geek: Thanks for the driver links. That should give me a little more ammo in the “discussion” with this guy. I’m not worried about the check, I’ve known this guy a long time and I know where he lives.
Hunter Hawk: I’ve done a lot of research about the games, and so far I’ve learned that a) Doom2 will work ok but only with the sound off, b) Daggerfall has serious issues (like quest items disappearing) and the only reliable option is to run it under Win98 or Dos only, and c) The Sims has extremely long load times if you have lots of 3rd-party objects, like I do. (We’re talking on the order of HOURS!) Of course I’ll tinker with these games myself and see how they work, but I’d like to have Win98 for a little while longer anyway, to ease in the transition between operating systems.
astro: This is the first I’ve heard of the hard drive space being a problem. Could you provide more info on patches and stuff? My plan is to use a 40GB partition for Win98, with the rest (120gb) for WinXP. I’ll probably also use my old (40GB) hard drive as backup/storage. The plan is to eventually use XP for all functions like browsing online, MS Office & newer games, with 98 used exclusively for older games. I’d still want the large partition readable by win98, though – will that be a problem?
Having an entire second unit really isn’t feasable – basically, no room to put it, and The Sims needs a faster computer anyway.
I have a Win98 install CD, but I’d really like to avoid going through a clean install – there’s many other programs I’d have to reinstall as well, and I don’t have the discs for many of them anymore. I’ve put this OS through many other hardware upgrades and it seems to respond well if I take my time about it…
Well no, because you can’t do that. Win98 can only see FAT32 partitions. You can install WinXP onto a FAT32 partition, but if you do that you lose some of the big advantages of using XP: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
WinXP can read and write to FAT32 partitions just fine, so I would advise that you leave the smaller FAT32 partition for Win98, and convert the larger one to NTFS for WinXP. If you must have commonly-shared files between teh two, then leave a separate partition for file/data storage, and format that partition in FAT32 so that both can use it.
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(Sidenote: there is a NTFS utility for Linux that allows it to read and write to NTFS, so there might be one out there for Win98, but I haven’t seen one)
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And if you use an upgrade-version of WinXP (as I did, just a couple days ago) it may install right onto the FAT32 partition for it–but WinXP has a built-in utility that will safely convert FAT32 partitions to NTFS, without losing any information on them. You can even convert the partition that WinXP is already installed on, though you have to reboot XP do do this.
Also note: WinXP can convert FAT32 partitions directly to NTFS, but there is no straightforward & direct way to convert-back a NTFS partition to FAT32.
As far as the RAM issue goes, I have heard lots of other people claim numbers, but I haven’t ever seen an official answer from Microsoft as to how much RAM win98 will use. I have run programs on it that I know used up most of the 384 megs of RAM I have in an older machine, and I am pretty sure of the circumstances, because one of the shortcomings of the program being used was that its file capacities were physical-RAM-dependent–if you loaded a file that was bigger than about twenty megs less than your RAM amount, the program crashed. Even at that, I remember seeing online that a LOT of gamers started having system problems in Win98 when they installed more than 512 megs of RAM.
~
By default, yes. But there is at least one NTFS for Win98 driver out there. According to the linked page, you’d still only be able to read the NTFS file system (no writes). While I wouldn’t find that terribly useful, others might.
I’m a little confused by Q.E.D.'s link. At first it says the maximum FAT32 volume size is 127.53GB, but on the next line says it’s 32GB. Which is correct?
If I use NTFS for the 120GB partition and run Win98 on the smaller 40GB partition, will it completely ignore the NTFS part, or will VBT’s (Very Bad Things) happen? I guess I don’t need Win98 to access the larger partition, especially if WinXP has no trouble reading the smaller one…
I found out that the guy uses a pre-configured image to install XP plus several other programs (all registered and paid for, of course!) which apparently is the reason he’s reluctant to muck around with a dual boot configuration. I don’t suppose it would work if, say, we set up the computer as a dual boot – original 98 + vanilla XP – and then overwrite the XP partition with the image…it would destroy the dual boot configuration, wouldn’t it?
Is it at all possible to create a dual boot system AFTER installing WinXP first? Everyone has said that it’s “best” to install Win98 first and then install XP on top of it (at which point the installation will automatically set up a dual boot if you choose) but I haven’t read anything that said it’s completely impossible to do it the other way.
I suspect the real reason that he doesn’t want to muck around with configuring a dual boot system of 98 and XP on this machine is not because he’s a lazy or a thief, but because it introduces a potential layer of complication that you will be looking for him to solve if hardware issues crop up. Resolving hardware driver and OS compatibility issues on a dual boot machine can be a huge, huge, huge time sink, and sometimes there are no good answers when dealing with new hardware and older OS compatibility.
I suspect that’s it’s going to take a lot of tinkering to get your dual boot system running the way you desire, and unless you’re prepared to pay him on an hourly basis he sees the problems looming ahead.
If it helps, I’ve had some success using NTVDM to provide DOS sound to games running under XP, and a recent update seems to support Doom 2. I’m afraid I can’t help with the other games. If you’ve still got your old PC, might it not be easier to keep it around to run these games and get a keyboard/video/mouse switch? I agree with astro that getting 98 running on modern hardware is quite likely to get unpleasant…
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s an app called VMWare. It allows you to run a virtual machine (hence the VM) within your existing operating system. You can create a file that the VM will use as it’s “hard drive”. You then start the VM with a click of the mouse - it grabs a chunk of memory (configurable, say 256MB), opens the file and then boots the O/S as if it were on a regular system.
It’s pretty cool, and may be a better option for you than mucking around with dual-boot. I’m not sure how much it’d cost, but it’s something you might want to check out.
Another vote for VMWare. It costs about $100, but you don’t have to dual boot, etc. You can run it full screen and then it’s just like running the hosted system. As a bonus, you can install Linux on a virtual machine if you want, etc. You can mount CD ISO files as CD’s as well.
Win 98 and others will recognize a FAT32 volume up to ~127 GB, but apparently Win 2k can’t format a volume larger than 32 GB. The article isn’t clear on whether or not Win 98 can format such a volume, but I suspect not.
Forgot about this. Yes, it’s sort of possible to do it the wrong way around but it’s much less convenient. It’s to do with what gets written on the master boot record of the hard disk (the very first part that gets read on boot-up). Windows 98 will completely ignore anything else on there already, wipe the MBR and just make it point to the partition that contains Windows 98. More recent OSs such as 2K and XP notice that something’s already installed and will install their own bootloader on the MBR, but configure it to give you a choice between them and the previous OS (i.e. they automatically configure the dual boot system).
If you do it the wrong way round, 98 will overwrite the XP MBR, making the XP partition temporarily unbootable. You’d then need to use the XP setup disc to repair the MBR (i.e. reinstall the XP bootloader), then manually configure the XP bootloader to allow your 98 partition to show up in the boot menu. A large pain in the butt, and it doesn’t gain you anything, as far as I can see.
When a drive is formatted in a FAT-based filesystem, it is formatted in little groups called clusters or allocation units. A cluster is the smallest amount of space that a file will take up on a disk in FAT filesystems. The size of the cluster depends on the size of the hard drive and the type of FAT (whether it’s FAT16, which is the FAT filesystem used by Microsoft until Windows95 OSR2 was introduced or FAT32, which was introduced with the OSR2 upgrade to Win95 and can still be used today by XP.) Cluster sizes started out at 2k for small drives under FAT16. The sizes of the cluster would increase in steps as the hard drive capacity increased until it maxed out at 32k for a 2GB partition, which was the size limit of FAT16. This means that as the drive capacity increased the amount of space a file would take up would actually get larger. For instance, if you had a small drive with a cluster size of 2k, a 33k file would take up 34k of drive space. However, if you had a large (for the time) hard drive of 2GB, that same 33k file would now take up 64k of drive space! (it would take 2 32k clusters). When FAT32 was developed, the limitations changed and you could free up a lot of disk space by converting a large (2GB or greater) drive to FAT32. You would now have smaller clusters on these larger drives, starting out at 4k this time. However, as drive capacity increased, the cluster size has to increase again until, for drives > 137GB, the cluster size is again 32k. The maximum theortical limit for FAT32 is about 8 terabytes; however in Windows XP, the maximum FAT32 volume it can format is 32GB - this is an aritificial limitation imposed by Microsoft. However, it can mount larger FAT32 volumes if those volumes have been formatted by a 3rd-party program.
Nope, while you’re booted to Win98, it will be happily oblivious to your 120GB NTFS partition - just think of Win98 as Sgt. Schultz to NTFS’ Captain Hogan ("I know NOTH-ING! I see NOTH-ING!)
Depending on how the image is set up, it could even destroy the 98 installation
I think the main difficulty is because Win98’s default boot sector doesn’t make allowances that there might be other operating systems. One thing that can be done is to A) Install WinXP into the NTFS partition; B) Install Win98 to the FAT32 partition; C) get a 3rd party utility like System Commander - it should be able to detect all the operating systems it supports and set up a boot menu for you.
