Running Windows 98 in 2020 and beyond...

[Wunderbar98]

Hi @D,Draker, wish my blown PSU had better protections. I want to slowly use up old hardware yet get upset when it dies.

New dual boot Windows 98 and Devuan build complete. From the blown system using same generic case, Samsung CD-R/CD-RW writer, 1 GB RAM (was 1.5 GB), 11 GB Maxtor drive (removed 40 GB second drive), NVIDIA Geforce2 MX400 AGP graphics and 19" ViewSonic CRT monitor. Freshly installed used parts: converted Dell 200 Watt PSU, ECS Elitegroup K7S5A motherboard with American Megatrends BIOS (2001), AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3 GHz) processor, onboard SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet, onboard SiS7012 AC'97 sound controller.

The PSU outputs are low side. To hopefully help BIOS disabled for floppy controller, serial ports x 2, parallel port and onboard modem. Only one hard drive and one optical drive. Dropping Win2000 and XP was no brainer for single small hard drive. Already got lots of good Windows XP installs and Windows 2000 is no longer useful to me (nostalgia only, no DOS, worse for gaming, so stable and professional it's boring).

The motherboard still has traditional game controller port, cool. Used homemade thermal paste for CPU. Tinny speakers got newly soldered power box extension cord (5 feet) and drilled ventilation ports. Ancient ViewSonic 19" CRT still working following solder repair several years ago.

The 11 GB Maxtor hard drive was zeroed, then 3 new primary partitions (4 GB FAT32, 6 GB ext2 Linux, 1 GB swap). It screams like a bandit and sometimes click-of-death but passed zero write fill, so SMART is disabled in BIOS and the drive will be used until it dies. The Windows 98 footprint is < 1 GB with firewall, RetroZilla, K-Meleon, OpenOffice and various maintenance software. The Devuan install is just over 3 GB with Dillo, Links2, older SeaMonkey, latest Firefox-ESR, Caja, LibreOffice 7, mplayer, Audacious, yt-dlp.

Migrating a seasoned GNU/Linux install from different hardware is standard, monolithic kernel helps. Abbreviated steps: LiveCD, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, fdisk partitions, mkfs.ext2, cp -axv source_path/* destination_path/, mnt new partition, chroot to install, blkid for drive summary, update /etc/fstab, update-initramfs, grub-install, grub-update, cross fingers, reboot.

Due to significant hardware changes i thought my customized and copied Windows 98 SE (Spectacular Everywhere) would soil it's lederhosen. Silly me, just lots of new hardware recognized and driver wizards on first boots. Answer prompts as good as possible, reboot when requested, insert Windows 98 install CD as instructed. Helped re-using same graphic card and system already set to <512 MB RAM.

Phew. When dust settled just ethernet and sound wasn't working. Drivers still freely available for download. Getting ethernet running was easy. Sound driver took effort as Windows was convinced the best driver was already installed, even though sound was not functional. And then when attempting to install the driver, Windows prompted this does not appear to be the correct driver. So like i've been doing with Windows 98 SE for over 25 years, uninstall and purge old hardware's software, manually remove broken drivers and *.inf files, get excited and muck around until it works :)

Last note as i've noticed this a couple times. If Windows 98 doesn't even boot with error 'Invalid System Disk', confirm the C: drive was formatted using Windows 98's FORMAT.COM executable. Once i used GNU/Linux, got error. Next time thought okay will format new FAT32 partition from Windows 2000, still didn't work. There must be different implementation of the format executable between Windows builds.