Multi-booting with Win98.

[Shoeberto]

I've got two OSes on my system right now (XP Pro and Mandrake) and I want to install 98 for playing some old games. I've got two HDs, the master being a NTFS drive with XP on it, the second is my 80 gig, with the large part being NTFS, a little bit allocated for Linux, and I just recently made about a gig partition formatted for Fat32. I want to put 98 in it, but I'm running into an obvious problem: 98 requires to be installed on a drive labeled C:. I thought that maybe the install would detect the slave Fat32 partition and install nicely on it, and allocate that as C: within 98 alone, but no go. It only wanted to install on the master.

Is there anyway around this, to force it to install into the Fat32 partition? Maybe by manually copying the files over into the partition, and then getting the boot manager to load into it?

[crono_logical]

Win98 must be installed on a primary partition. Furthermore, the primary partition it is on must be the only visible/enabled one on the drive whilst it is running, otherwise you risk data corruption. Which means it'll have to be near the front of a drive, due to these two things. I don't think it matters which physical disk you stick it on, but I'm not certain on that. I'll go test that now, actually :p

In any case, I reckon if you set up the FAT32 partition correctly as above, at the front of a drive as a primary partition, and hide all the other partitions that could cause problems, you can install Win98 as normal. Then use something like the grub bootloader to multiboot, remembering to configure it to unhide/hide partitions as appropriate depending on which OS you pick in the menu on startup. Obviously you have to make sure you have a boot CD or something handy (eg Gentoo LiveCD or Knoppix) so you can unhide the other partitions again. so you can get back into linux to set up grub.


EDIT: Ok, maybe you shouldn't do that. Looks like Win98 only wants to be installed on the first HD, and also if it doesn't recognise the partition type, including NTFS, it'll want to wipe the entire disk and take over the entire thing. Hmm.

Looks like you can either a) install on the first disk. This requires resizing the partitions on the first HD to make space for a FAT 32 primary partition so Win98 won't take over the whole thing. Or b) install on the second disk. Win98 wants to boot off the first though, so you'll have to physically swap the HDs around permanently. Before swapping, you'll have to edit your /etc/fstab in linux to reflect this change so that still works, and the boot.ini on the XP partition too so XP still boots. Then make sure a bootloader is set up on the to-be-new first disk correctly to boot either of your existing installations. Then swap the disks, and check they both still boot fine. If they don't, then you might wnt to swap the disks back and double check your settings. If they do, then make the FAT32 primary partition on the new first disk and install Win98. Then you'll probably have to use Knoppix/Gentoo Live CD/linux bootdisk to re-setup your bootloader again since WIn98 will wipe the working one.

Clearly, the second method is pretty nasty, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a simpler way to do this :p

[Endless]

I'd say the easiest way is to not install Win98 on its own drive, but to run it from either Win4Lin or vmware (which exists for both XP and Linux), or even try WineX/Cedega. Try it at any rate before going the real install way. Old games most likely won't need 3d acceleration from DirectX, so they should work fine under the emus. Besides, you can easily mess up with emus, it won't wipe your whole hard-drive.

[Shoeberto]

Obviously no matter what I would do, it's going to be a lot nastier than what I want it to do, so could you maybe recommend a different way of doing things? I only want 98 for playing old DOS games. I've used the DOSBox emulator in XP with very limited success.

edit: You got to it before I could ask. Thanks.

edit again: Think I'll try Cedega. Googling it showed that people had a few problems with more recent games, but I'm only interested in oldies right now. Thanks again.

edit: Okay, so you have to pay for all of those. That's not very much in the spirit of open source, now is it?

[Dr Unne]

You can get a free version of Cedega/winex via their CVS, but yeah, you have to pay if you want a precompiled version, or one with all their proprietary bells and whistles. Not worth paying for in my opinion, unless you've checked their database and see that the games you want to play definitely work.

If you want to play old DOS games, buy a 486 on ebay for $25.

[Endless]

Cedega can be downloaded if you subscribe to their site, which I think costs $5 per month (and you only need the minimum, I think it's 1 month or 3 to be able to download). Cedega is the most recent version of WineX, but you can get Wine (it won't have all the fancy gui stuff and the directx8+ support) for free, check you rpm manager in Mandrake, I know it has it (I use Mandrake), and add the cooker to have the most recent version.

Win4Lin and vmware can be gotten from emule and similars, but then that wouldn't be legal.

[Shoeberto]

I installed Wine yesterday but it'd never start running. It'd try to start up, time out, and crash on itself. Ah well.

Yeah, maybe I will just try and build a cheap PC or something, unless Wine'll start running.

[Dr Unne]

Wine is painful. It'll work one week and not the next week.

[crono_logical]

Like Windows then? :p

[Dr Unne]

Wine sometimes runs programs better than Windows itself actually. RO for example.