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Igel M300C: Windows 98 

Windows 98

This is a bit of a negative but I thought I'd include it for completeness.

A friend has an elderly Windows 98SE system that recently gave them a few heart-stopping moments when it wouldn't boot. (Problem since resolved). There is legacy software running on there and it is not a simple matter to upgrade. I decided to see if I could get it running on alternative hardware and picked on the M300C as a possible candidate.

Step one was to come away with an image of the existing Windows 98 partition. This was done by booting Tinycore from a CDROM, mounting an external USB drive and then copying the partition to it using 'dd'. The Win 98SE partition was ~2GB in size.

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/Win98HDA1.img bs=1024k

Next I plugged in a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive to a CF adapter and plugged it into a USB/IDE adapter. This I plugged into a Linux box. I then partitioned the Microdrive as:

  1. hda1 ~1GB for Linux
  2. hda2 ~2GB for Windows 98 system. Partition type 0E - FAT16
  3. hda3 ~1GB for Windows. Partition type 0C - FAT32

I installed Tinycore 3.3 on partition 1, restored the Windows 98 system to partition 2, formatted partition 3 as FAT32 and copied onto it the contents of the Windows 98SE CDROM. Subsequently I also added some drivers that I'd downloaded from VIAs site.

I transferred the Microdrive over to the M300C and booted Tinycore. In order to dual boot Linux and Windows I added the following lines to Grub's menu.lst file:

title Windows 98
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
makeactive

Booting into Windows was semi-successful as it went through the 'found new hardware loading drivers' stage. I ended up with a system where things sort-of worked but the mouse didn't. Having installed the drivers for the CN700 display chip the system died every time I tried to change the screen resolution.

To cut a long story short I ended up deciding to do a clean install of Windows 98. This consistently blue-screens in the middle of the install process and so that's where things have stopped.

FYI the Windows 98SE system is running on Wyse VX90L.

 


Any comments? email me.    Last update December 2010