Despite being launched in the last millennium there is still an interest in Windows 98 primarily driven by those who want to revisit the computer games they used to play in their youth. ("Retro Gaming")
There are two basic ways this can be approached - running Windows 98 in a virtual machine on modern hardware or installing it and running it on old (ancient) hardware. Here I'm looking at running it directly on old(ish) hardware. This hardware really has to date from the right period (or soon after). The further you move away from the Windows 98 era the less likely it will be that you can find Windows 98 drivers for your chosen hardware.
Windows 98 was launched in June 1998 and support ended in July 2006. Windows 98 SE was launched in May 1999 with support also ending in July 2006. On the home front, following Windows 98 we had Windows ME (September 2000) and the Windows XP (October 2001). From this you can see that a suitable machine really needs to date from 1998 to maybe the mid 2000s.
A key thing to note is that Windows 98 dates from the time when almost all PCs were fitted with floppy drives, a hard disk and a CDROM drive. It also sat on top of MSDOS and inherited certain features from that environment. Floppy disks appeared as drives A: and/or B:, the first hard drive located by the software was drive C: with the CDROM drive appearing as drive D: - or maybe higher if the hard drive had a number of partitions on it.
The DOS/Windows operating system was installed from either:
Elements of this architecture are reflected in the system software. For example the MSDOS disk partitioning program FDISK will only let you set the 'active' partition flag in the partition table on the first hard drive in the system. You can't set it on a partition in the second one. (I discovered this when I was about to remove the first drive and so promote the second drive to be the active one). Similarly the command FDISK /MBR which you can use to write (or restore) the master boot record to a drive will only act on the first hard disk (drive C:). There's no problem with this if you've just booted something off drive A:, but no good to you if you've just booted off a USB flash drive to format another drive in your system as the USB flash drive will be automatically marked as drive C:.
These were also the early days of USB and USB pen drives. Support was a little hit-and-miss and they were not part of the mainstream Windows environment. Luckily the lack of support has been remedied by a third-party application - nusb36e.exe - that improves matters.
With Thin Clients we're looking at hardware with an SSD/DOM (equivalent to a hard drive) and USB ports. Any USB pen drive you boot off in a thin client will almost certainly be labelled by DOS as the C: drive. Whilst there are USB-connected floppy drives and CDROM drives I am discounting them in this article which is about using a Thin Client 'as is' with the minimum of additional hardware.
As you can find elsewhere there are a variety of approaches you can take to get Windows 98 onto your chosen hardware, some straight forward(ish) and some not so straight forward. There is also the problem that once Windows 98 gets control the USB ports may well vanish.
As I wrote after my previous exercise in installing Windows 98 onto a Wyse Vx0:
Having installed Windows 98SE I found, due to lack of suitable drivers, I had a system with with a clunky 640 x 480 display, no working ethernet interface and no working USB ports so my keyboard and mouse stopped working.
I decided this time to spend a little time coming up with a simple and repeatable approach that would simplify the task of getting Windows 98 onto a thin client. Note: Finding and installing the necessary hardware drivers so that it actually runs reasonably on a particular thin client is another issue!
The approach is simple in concept: We need to setup the internal flash drive on the thin client so that:
The second point means that you need sufficient storage for the installation source files and the final space taken up by Windows 98, so you're looking for at least 500MB. (On my trial with a Wyse Cx0 the installation files took up ~124MB. Following installation of Windows 98SE about 340MB of disk space was in use).
My ambition was to end up with a DOS bootable drive with all the necessary Windows 98 SE installation files on it. In essence something quite simple to do except for the 'bootable' bit as the thin client has no A: drive. As noted above the standard MSDOS tools are geared up to work on drive C: so, if you intend to use them, you need to have booted from floppy or a CDROM.
The breakthrough came when I found the Linux program ms-sys that would add the necessary boot files to any drive/partition. With this in hand it was simple process to setup the thin client's SSD/DOM drive from a Linux environment.
To make life easier I created a script to do this. Finally, to make life even easier I remastered the current version of Tiny Core linux to include (almost) all the required files. (If you're interested the details are in the Tools directory).
That should get you into Windows 98SE leaving you with the next problem of finding and installing the right drivers....
Don't forget that at this point in time you still have the bootable USB flash drive that you used to set the system up. Whilst you have poor USB support in Windows 98 you can still use this to transfer additional files to your nascent Windows 98 system.
As always is the case in home-grown apps the tools described here have not been extensively tested with a multitude of hardware and by a lot of people. If you use the Tiny Core ISO and embedded script please feel free to email me with any comments/problems you may have. The email link to use is at the bottom of every page.