Win98 on top of vista/xp

[Guest]

Hi,
Here's my situation. I have 2 computers: one with vista and the other with
xp and I am trying to install win 98 on an external FAT32 harddrive for the
sole purpose of playing my ol' computer games. Is this possible? Or would i
just need to install win98 on the current computers and forget the external
drive? If so, can anyone help me with that? I'd appreciate any help.

 

[Richard G. Harper]

Personally, I'd download the free Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft and install
it, then install Windows 98 as a virtual PC running under Vista.

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Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User] (e-mail address removed)
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[DP]

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but it seems to me that in addition to
what you're describing, you'd also have to have some way of choosing to boot
into Win98 at startup.
So, whether the ext drive is turned on or not (or even connected or not),
you would always be faced at startup with the question of whether you wanted
to boot Vista or W98 on one machine and XP or W98 on the other. So, if you
don't find that an annoyance, then that's not an issue. I guess one way you
could avoid that would be (assuming both machines have floppy drives) to
create a bootdisk that would have an autoexec.bat file on it that would
automatically boot to Windows 98 when the floppy is in the drive, the ext
drive is turned on before the computer is and assuming your computer will
even let you use an OS that is resident on an external drive.

One other thing: read/write speeds on the external HDD may not be good
enough to run the OS from it.

Anyway, those are some GENERAL things that come to mind for me. You'll
probably get some more specific advice from others.

I think if you have HDD space on your two machines, just install W98 on both
and use a dual-boot option.

 

[Guest]

The way that I read it 98 is not compatible with Vista, different file
systems. XP is compatible with either, it can be configured as FAT 32 or the
newer version that Vista uses. I have the same problem, just got a new PC
with Vista and I don't want to throw away all my old games. I am trying to
setup a dual boot system with Vista and possibly XP. Problem with 98 is that
Microsoft no longer supports it so no new software will work with it, which
screws me as far as doing my taxes each year. Also there are no drivers for
my printer that work with Vista, and its a perfectly good printer, nothing
wrong with it so why should I be forced to replace it. You might say that I
am a bit pissed at Microsoft, to them its all about money, they don't
understand that some of us don't have the bucks to replace everything that we
have every few years.

 

[DP]

If you have only one HDD on your system, couldn't you partition it and make
one of the partitions a FAT partition (whether 32 or 16 or whatever)? Then
you could install Win 98 to that partition and dual boot.
Is there a reason that won't work as long as Win 98 never tries to access
the files on Vista (NTFS) parition? Vista should still be able to access
files on a FAT 32 disk with no problem, as far as I know.

 

[Charlie Tame]

Don't know about setting up dual boot with 98, I think 98 would have to
be on there first with XP or Vista second. 98 can only use FAT so would
not see the other partitions, but XP or Vista could read / write the
FACT partition.

However I mainly was thinking printer. See if the printer has an
emulation mode, for example HP Laserjets were emulated by others as a
sort of "Standard". If your printer can do that AND a Vista driver can
be found for that emulation you should be okay.


DP wrote:

 

[DP]

However I mainly was thinking printer. See if the printer has an emulation
mode, for example HP Laserjets were emulated by others as a sort of
"Standard". If your printer can do that AND a Vista driver can be found
for that emulation you should be okay.

You lost me, Charlie. What does a printer have to do with this discussion?