Member Avatar for JoHamm

Well, silly as it sounds, I have to install windows 98 onto my pc because I have equipment that doesn't have a driver for XP, and I need to be able to access it, so I am now reconfiguring my pc, and a friend told me to install 98 first, reboot, then install XP on a different partition to create a dual boot. I have a RAID 0 set up on the pc, which I broke up (I plan to use one of the drives for the OS), so when I boot up, it displays the RAID, and reads 'Failed' in red (because the drives are not there) but underneath it, it shows that the board recognizes the physical drive (my 500 GB). However, when it gets to the A prompt, I type in the command 'fdisk' in order to format it, but it reads that there is no drive. I am wondering if this is because 98 sees the RAID first, and can't see the physical drive, or is this a completely different problem from what I'm guessing?

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The exchange between and highlights a common theme: legacy installers and modern motherboards often disagree. Two practical, lower-risk strategies tend to work better than trying to force an old installer onto current hardware: run the legacy OS inside a virtual machine, or emulate period-accurate hardware when direct hardware access is required.

A compact workflow that preserves the host system and avoids firmware conflicts:

  • Prepare the windows 9x install media as an ISO or physical disc image.
  • Create a virtual machine with VirtualBox or VMware Player and attach the ISO. Virtualization isolates the installer from host firmware and storage quirks; see the VirtualBox manual (https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/) and VMware Player product page (https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html).
  • When the legacy software needs near-perfect hardware behavior (drivers that expect real ISA/PCI timing), use a hardware emulator such as PCem for more accurate legacy hardware emulation ().
  • To prepare or copy files to a real drive without touching the target machine, attach the drive to a modern host and use a reliable partitioning/live environment such as GParted Live (https://gparted.org/livecd.php).

Note: virtual machines simplify driver and partitioning headaches but will not provide direct access to certain physical buses or legacy expansion devices; emulation or a period-correct physical machine is the safer path when that access is mandatory.

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Member Avatar for caperjack

not positive but ,i don't think that the win98 fdisk can format a 500 gig hdd ,to big !!
also think you need to go into setup/bios and disable the raid first .
best thing is to use a utility from the hard drive maker to setup and partition the drive first ,find it on there web site .
don't forget that win98 need to be formatted fat32 and xp can be either ntfs or fat32 but ntfs is more stable for xp.

Member Avatar for JoHamm

RAID was part of the problem... but found out that win98 can't handle anything over 1 GB RAM... got all the way to formatting the disk, and it freaked out... so I abandon it... found older system to install 98 on.


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