Installing windows 98 SE next to windows XP from partition

[morris]

2 minutes ago, Mcinwwl said:

One question that went unanswered is whether i can somehow feed a separate partition with win98 installation files and make it bootable, so i can install without floppy/cd/rufus prepared pendrive. I guess the answer is "no"... ?

You don't need to create a separate partition to do it, you can copy the WIN98 folder from the CD to the partition where you are going to install Windows 98SE (first partition, first hard drive). When you create this partition, before copying the files, make sure to make it bootable. To make sure it's bootable, format it with:

format /s C:\

Then you can boot directly to DOS from that partition, and then go to the WIN98 folder and run setup.exe and that's it!

So the short answer is: yes, it can be done, but make sure your partition is bootable. To copy the files and all subfolders you can use "xcopy /e".

Good luck

[jaclaz]

14 hours ago, Mcinwwl said:

One question that went unanswered is whether i can somehow feed a separate partition with win98 installation files and make it bootable, so i can install without floppy/cd/rufus prepared pendrive. I guess the answer is "no"... ?

Sure you can.

Once (with all due respect for those proposing it) set aside the idea of a "double install" of 98 and XP on a same (FAT32) partition which - I repeat - can be done, but is not particularly "smart" and prone to issues in everyday use, you may want to think at a separate partition install as:
1) hide the XP partition (it may even be not needed as DOS/Win9x won't touch a 0x07 ID (NTFS) partition)
2) create a new FAT32 one
3) make it active

In the above situation, the disk appears to Windows 98 setup as a disk with a single partition, so you can

4) install Windows 98 normally

The possible issues may come later, IF you want to have both partitions visible from one or the other booted OS (or from both) with drive lettering.

If you (at every boot) hide the "other" partition, you won't have such issues, but you won't have any handy way to exchange files between the two OSes, and (you may believe me or not) having the drive letter C: assigned to two different partitions depending on which OS is booted is likely - before or later - to create confusion.

As said before, there may (or there may be not) an issue with the FAT32 partition (if it is made "after" the XP/NTFS one) to be "too far" on the disk to be correctly booted in DOS.

jaclaz

[Goodmaneuver]

On 6/11/2023 at 5:03 AM, Mcinwwl said:

One question that went unanswered is whether i can somehow feed a separate partition with win98 installation files and make it bootable

A separate partition has a different drive letter of course. This has an issue that you should be aware of. Normally you can make the hard drive removable which means that you can assign a drive letter but not on a drive with 2 or more partitions. If using a second partition for the OS; it means that your machine has to not be changed as far as hard drive installation is concerned as your second primary partition's drive letter will be volatile when placing new drives on the machine. If you cannot install a separate drive for XP or 98 and the hardware drive configuration is not to be changed than it will be OK as long as the 98's partition end is is under 137GB from the start of the drive and the total drive size is under 2TB.