There are some issues here.
Adding Win98 to a system already running Media Center (or any other flavor
of XP) is not straightforward. The general rule is install older operating
systems before newer. Also, Win98 does not work correctly if the system has
more than 512MB of ram and since you are running Media Center you probably
either have at least 1GB or wish you did.
I suggest the following, especially for Win98 and linux. Don't multiboot
with them at all. Use Virtual PC 2004 on the Media Center partition and
then you can run Win98 and as many flavors of Linux, BSD, etc that you want
without having to reboot or worry about partitioning, corrupting the MBR,
grub, system memory, etc. Since you can allocate ram to a virtual machine,
you can set the ram for Win98 to 512MB or less so that it will run correctly
even on a system with several GB of ram.
Each operating system will run in its own window on your MCE desktop
whenever you want and you can run several at the same time if you have
sufficient memory. Note, however, that Virtual PC cannot be installed on
any x64 OS at this time, so it would need to go on the x86 version of
Windows (MCE).
As for, XP x64, did it come with your computer (I am assuming that you are
running a 64-bit cpu like an AMD64 Athlon)? Probably not if you have a
Media Center computer. If you have not obtained x64 yet, remember that you
cannot buy it in a retail store. It is like MCE. It is OEM and sold
preinstalled on a new computer or sold by system builders with qualifying
hardware.
Before you plunge into x64, I suggest you subscribe to
microsoft.public.windows.64bit.general and get some pointers on securing
64-bit drivers. 32-bit device drivers will not work on x64 BY DESIGN.
There are not workarounds. This is NOT a bug that may get fixed. That
means that some of your devices such as your printer, scanner, web camera,
wireless router, and so on may not work with x64 and there may not be 64-bit
drivers for some of them. A good website for x64 info on available x64
device drivers is PlanetAMD64. That and the newsgroup I suggested above are
the top sources anywhere for prospective XP Pro x64 users.
I am running x64 preinstalled on an AMD64 dual-core system from a system
builder so naturally my system came with the right drivers, but it takes
serious research to set up x64 on a system from scratch. x64 was not
released as a consumer item because of the device driver issue.
Having said all of that, I have found x64 to be rock solid. My XP Pro x86
computers can't come close x64's stability. But you have to research
thoroughly before going 64 or you will wind up a disgruntled user. Read the
newsgroup to see what I mean.
