Win98 Live PC
Submitted by Mark Winzenburg on February 8, 2007 - 7:20pm.
I finally managed to create a Windows 98 LivePC. For some reason, although I could get one boot from the Win98 CD to start the setup, it always demanded a boot floppy after a reboot. Eventually I found an old Win98 recovery disk and that did the trick.
While the OS works, it treats my nVidia 7600 GT graphics as generic VGA, and doesn't recognize the integrated nVidia nForce audio at all. I've been unable to find native Win98 drivers for these, as my PC - an old eMachines T3256 - shipped with XP.
So, are there any suggestions for at least getting XGA graphics and basic sound out of this system?
Mark
Win98 Works!
Submitted by Mark Winzenburg on February 9, 2007 - 2:40pm.
John, thanks for help. I now have XGA graphics and sound.
In setting up an XP LivePC, you folks recommend the xpfromcd script because (1) the script sets up Windows such that the 'system state' is separate from the 'user state', putting user data on a different virtual drive, and (2) because you can access your files in 'My Documents' folder from both inside as well as outside the LivePC.
How would I get this to work with Win98 as well? Is there something to modify in the configuration?
Mark
Hi Mark, Glad to hear you
Submitted by John Whaley on February 11, 2007 - 9:43pm.
Hi Mark,
Glad to hear you got it working. To set up the system state separate from the user state, you need to put the user profile on a separate, persistent disk. On Windows XP, you can change a registry key to set the location of the user profile. I'm not sure if/where the same functionality exists in Win98. It's been quite a long time since I've used it! Keep in mind that this is only useful if you want to have multiple machines share the same image and be able to update them without losing user state.
The shared 'My Documents' folder is accomplished by mounting a share on the host in the guest. On Windows XP, the moka5 Geust Tools hook the gina DLL to mount it early in the boot process. On Windows 98, I don't think there is a gina DLL but there should be another way to automatically mount the share on startup. The share information is generated on every LivePC execution and passed in through the vmx file. In the guest OS, there is a special vmcmd that can read the information in the vmx. This is what the moka5 Guest Tools uses to mount the share.
-John
Win98 Live PC
Submitted by Tilo Grune on June 29, 2007 - 2:00am.
Hello,
I also intersting in an Win98 Live PC for older PC's. How you create this Live PC? I haven't a bootable Win 98, so I start first to install FreeDos. But the memory driver of FreeDos see only 569 k of RAM. So you can make available the Win98 LivePc in the LivePC Library.
Thanks in Advance
VMware tools
You should install the VMware Tools for better graphics performance. VMware Tools is distributed with VMware Server or Workstation; you can also download the VMware Tools from various other sites. Extract it and run the "setup.exe" from within the Win98 guest to install the tools.
In terms of the sound, you will need to install the sound drivers for the virtual sound adapter. The filename is SBPCTAudioSetup_W9x.ZIP and you can get it on the Creative web site. If you have problems with the sound playing too fast, take a look at the workarounds described here.
-John