Win98 on HP NX7400 or equivalent - help or experiences needed

[piete]

Hi! I just joined the forums. I have been reading the posts and searching the internet, but I haven't been able to reach the conclusion if it is worthwhile to have a Windows 98SE running on my HP NX7400. So far I have tried the unattended install (UBCD) and a normal install and have run the autopatcher, too. Win98 could once read my USB sticks (I guess that was after the autopatcher) but so far I have not been able to see other partitions (it is installed on a Seagate FreeAgent USB drive, where WinXP is running perfectly after applying the USB install guide at www.ngine.de) or CD drive, not to mention to change screen resolution or hear any sound. By the way, UBCD cannot load all the drivers, I guess it hangs up trying to load the USB driver.

My question is: Is it worthwhile at all to have Win98 on this computer, or is my mission to get a decent screen resolution (above 640x480) and sound already doomed?

Here are some details of my computer:

HP NX7400 notebook

Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 1.83GHz

Mobile Intel 945GM Express chipset

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950

Audio chipset ADI1981HD PremierSound High Definition Audio

Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG 802.11 a/b/g WLAN

Hard disk Seagate ST96812AS (not totally sure about this) 80GB

External hd Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500GB

I was happy to have Win98 running perfectly on my previous HP Pavilion ze4901ea notebook, with the exception of shutdown (which works normally on the new one).

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

[piete]

I'm happy to report some progress (and reup the thread to give other people a chance to comment, too! I was already going to give up on the whole thing but then I decided that it is good to have a small Fat partition in the beginning of a hard disk anyway, so why not with a Windows 98?

I erased my external Seagate FreeAgent and installed Win98SE on a first 2GB Fat32 partition. Only after that I created a second 32GB Fat32 partition that is now visible (I created it with Gparted and formatted in Win98SE). So now I can see another partition. I'm planning to create only two more primary NTFS partitions, one for XP and another for data storage (I have Vista Business and Kubuntu on my internal hard disk). The reason for not to create any logical partitions is that playing around with my previous configuration I removed and recreated the first partition only to mix the partition numbering and to lose most information about the logical partitions. I guess their information were stored somewhere in the first partition.

Maybe I should also mention that during the installation there were (always, during the first times, too) a lot of problems and hangups with blue screens, saying write errors on C: or something else but doing a cold start every time eventually got me to the end. I am not sure if they were because I was installing on a USB hard disk.

To see the CD drive I just copied the boot floppy disk image's autoexec.bat and config.sys onto C: (and modified them a little). I also got a 2MB ramdisk with the bargain Maybe there is room for some optimization in those boot files but for now I'm happy it works.

The USB is a mystery, I remember being able to use USB sticks earlier but now the system doesn't recognize them, even after the newest autopatcher (that installs with no interruptions compared to the earlier version, thanks to soporific for that). But maybe I will have to try install the earlier version, just to see if there's any difference (as somebody mentioned in another thread, it is easy to have "system restore points" just by copying the WINDOWS directory on another system). I have also tried several "generic" USB drivers with no success.

For now, the network connection is not a priority. I am happy to connect either by Vista or by Kubuntu and download all I need with them.

So that leaves the graphics and sound (and USB).

Sound: I don't even know where to start, the computer hasn't produced even a beep (I may have turned off the speakers). I have tried several random drivers (98 drivers for other chipsets or chipset drivers for other OS's). Is there not a generic sound driver that would produce at least some sound?

Graphics: I have tried everything I have come across in the internet (including the SVGA driver, it gives the option to change the resolution but restarting windows gives an error and it returns to VGA). The SciTech Software's my.scitechsoft.com gives the option to generate drivers for i945GM but it doesn't build the driver. I tried their driver for i945G and i915GM (I guess it's the same driver) but it refuses to install.

Would someone know a hack for those, the chipsets can't be that different or can they? Or again, is there not a generic driver (à la VESA) that would just get a higher resolution?

Anyway, the same company's Display Doctor (although the install does not go to the end, the install.log is not created thus making the uninstall impossible) tests my display in its full 1280x800x32, so it makes me think there should be a way for Win98 to be able to do that.

So I repeat my request for help or comments. I didn't give up on Win98 yet and if somebody finds solutions for my problems it will help us all with modern hardware. Let's try to keep Win98 alive!

Edited October 3, 2007 by piete