TheJackal

This is a perfect recipe for wasting many hours, or for a long learning experience. Since you have already thrown out the old computer, I would also throw out the old HDD. Only a few modern motherboards work with Win98. If the motherboard of your Acer M5630 does not officially support Win98, then you will get from one mess into the next with this HDD. Hmm it's not so bad, at least, it works a lot better than I expected. Sure not everything's going to work but I don't expect it to. If I was really serious about using Win98 stuff, I'd just get an old computer and run it on there. One thing I would like to figure out tho is how to extract the boot sector into a BOOTSECT.DOS file so I can use the Vista boot menu to start Win98, instead of having to hit the F12 key at just the right time. I tried one method (create "read.scr" and use debug) but that didn't work. Any ideas?

Wow thanks for all the responses guys, looks like this topic ended up drifting a bit I did some fishing around in the registry and fixed the "more than one PCI.VXD bus type" error. I found where the information for the devices were stored and deleted the "Driver" string. I was then going to work on it but realized it worked just fine without loading any drivers so I left it at that. AFAIK it looks like it loads PCI.VXD for the entire PCI bus, and doesn't need to load it again, or else you end up with that error. I'm still working on the sound and video drivers. Don't think I'll get too far with those, but I did find a couple of threads about that here and on other forums. Someone said that Realtek made HD Audio drivers for 98 a few years back, and if you download the old version it'll probably work. I did that but it still came up with an error that said the driver was "not supported under 'Windows 9X.'" Another thing I discovered was that installing the unofficial Native USB Drivers caused Windows to not be able to recognize HID devices anymore. So I could use my USB DVD-RW drive and card reader, but my USB mouse and keyboard was not being recognized properly. As a result I couldn't use the mouse wheel and for me that is a must. So I uninstalled the drivers and unpacked them manually, then I installed them manually for the unknown devices. Now the keyboard, mouse, and card readers work just fine. The DVD drive works too but only as a CD-ROM drive. That's fine as I probably won't burn any CDs while in 98 anyway.

New here, been looking around for some things and I've come across this site a few times, looks pretty neat. One day I remembered that I had an old hard drive with freshly-installed Windows 98 on it from an old computer I threw out a few months ago. I thought, I wonder if I could boot Windows 98 on a relatively new Acer M5630. hmm... After getting some initial bugs worked out (had to set a memory limit because of the >1GB issue, also had to deal with a PnP issue as it was originally configured for APM instead of ACPI BIOS) I was able to boot to the Windows 98 desktop. Never thought I'd get this far, so even at 620×480, it looks pretty good to me! As expected some of the hardware was not able to be recognized by Windows. I did find chipset drivers, but they are for Windows 2000. Gave it a shot anyway, and it mostly works except for 3 devices that say that the "computer is reporting two PCI.VXD types." What exactly does that mean, anyway? I'll probably go back to the default drivers, not that those were without fault but at least the PCI stuff worked. Oddly enough Realtek has a Win98 driver for their Gigabit Ethernet card. They don't write sound drivers tho and it appears that the HD audio stuff is impossible to use on 9x. No big deal. I found a generic video driver that works OK, it lets me get close to what my monitor's resolution is, but not quite. Still, better than that 640×480 mode. I have noticed 2 issues with it tho. I do have the AutoPatcher program, that thing is great, I had no idea where all the updates were going to come from as Microsoft has recently redone their "Service & Support" section and removed a lot of stuff from it. I know most people using Windows 98 are running it on old hardware, not trying to run it on new stuff. But I know some people have tried it. What did you learn from that experience?