I'm pretty sure the Windows 98 CD is bootable. Try adjusting your VMWare BIOS (by pressing the DEL key on startup.. I think) to boot off the CD.

I hate to contradict you, but I don't think the Win98 cd is bootable. That's why everyone and their mother searches for the ever-valuable Windows98 boot/startup disk. Check the VMWare virtual machine configuration (when the VM is powered down) and make sure it has access to all of your hardware (mounted, etc.)

Also, what version of VMWare is this, 3? 4?

Thanks guys. I took your advice and adjusted the boot order in VMware, and it worked. Again, thanks a lot.

all the windows CD i have seen are bootable, no matter 98, 2000 or XP. maybe i'm using an illegal copy.

Tekmaven convinced me Win98 cds are bootable ... even though I don't remember them being. Guess I'm wrong!

Copies of Windows 98 provided with many OEM PC's are not bootable. Ones provided with barebones kits that require you to load windows usually are. I have several copies on Win98SE that won't boot, and several the do.

www.badflash.com

Well that settles that.

I just booted a Dell XPS400 PC to a Microsoft Win98SE CD. I selected CD-
ROM support at boot, and it created a virtual disk D:, and the CDROM drive E: Dell also provides a bootable Win98 system restore CD. Just set the bios to boot to the CD Drive before the fixed hard drive. Hopefully this helps!

Hello All.

In order to understand vmware under the simplest of circumstances, I successfully created a few virtual DOS machines. Now, all of a sudden, when I try to create one, vmware does not recognize my diskette drive (there is a bootable DOS diskette sitting in there).

While the virtual machine is booting, I jumped into the machine's BIOS setup. Everything looks fine. The diskette drive is the first boot device.

There does not seem to be any configuration files in the program directory nor any apparent configuration information in the registry.

The problem first appeared after I had a conflict between 2 virtual machines trying to access the same physical diskette drive. A message box appeared advising me that the drive would be deactivated for the one virtual machine.

Any idea as to what is going on here?


Regards,
Fuzzy