Virtual PC being a Virtual pain in the a..
 

I have WIN XP sp2 operating system.

I desire Win 98 os in Virtual PC environment.

I have a legit Win 98 cd in the drive. I follow all steps on installing virtual pc and setting up the ram and memory space for a windows 98 virtual os. I get to the step where you click the "START" button to go install windows 98 cd and the computer dies and goes to blue screen and restarts. Any ideas? I have looked at half a dozen walkthroughs including abandonia's and not having any luck.

I do not have the expertise with Virtual PCs to be able to be of help for your particular problem... However, could I ask you why exactly you wish to have a virtual drive with Win98 when you are using Windows XP?

Windows XP is great to emulate Windows 98 and have good compatibility with that system. Usually one only need to go in the compatibility tab for the desired program and switch compatibility with Windows 98 to run said program.

What "start" button? Which computer crashes, the host (real) or guest (virtual)? Which tutorial are you following (link), and at what point did you have problems?

To put it in short I'm sick and tired of making concessions because I'm trying to stick the square peg in the round hole. I'm sick of games that don't have music or glitch because they were never meant to be run in this OS. You're right a lot of games will run well in XP. Many will run almost OK and I'm tired of it.

The two specifically I'm into right now are Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries and Mechwarrior 3. With tweaking and a couple hours sunk into combing the net for troubleshoots and patches I was able to get both to install and run, only to have later missions in the game become unbeatable due to crashes. I'm sick of it.

WinXP does great with some games.

I have Magic The Gathering Shandalar running like a top on it. Diablo II is running like a top on it dunno if it was originally an XP release or what. Then you have a lot of no-music games. I believe Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat was one. Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft Strahd's Possession was one. Dark Sun Shattered Lands was one also I believe. I find this unacceptable as the music often makes a game what it is. What would Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden or Final Fantasy have been without gaming music?

People try to band aid situations with Dosbox. Dosbox is a wonderful program. Its useability varies wildly. Some games its best to have a top of the line computer to bring the game up to normal speed. Some games music does not play. Lets be honest MS Dos was a B to play games in anyway with memory and other crashes the norm so I don't hate on DosBox but I want the real Operating Systems.

I am doing research on Dual Boot. I would be open to whatever gets me multiple operating systems.

I have WIN XP.

I want Win 98

Then I will look to trying to get MS Dos although I have some confusion as to if its bundled into Win 98.

Tired of dumping hours and hours into making these games work on operating systems they were never meant to run on. For every eureka game where everything works perfect there are 3 games that have no music, crash later in the game, don't have the video cut scenes, etc. Sorry to vent but I need to vent lol.

The real host computer crashes on Step 10 when I click "START" button
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Microsoft-Virtual-PC

I have also tried to follow the abandonia instructions with same result.

I am open to setting up a dual boot for this computer. This hard drive has 1.5 tera and I have a backup drive I can copy from if it becomes unuseable for some reason.

Can you say what message you got on blue screen? It's almost surely something with drivers, but always good to be sure...

No message PC just dies. I guess technically thats not blue screen although my flatscreen tv I have hooked up to the computer does go blue but thats the tv.

I am looking into Dual boot.

If that happens, you have a problem in your computer. It's difficult to know what.

As far as DOS goes, if you want the "real" OS you'll have to get an old computer. And as you say you'll have pesky problems with memory etc. Which by the way apply exactly the same in Windows 9x; the only difference is that games made in the late 90's didn't have such pesky memory requirements as earlier ones. Windows 9x does include DOS (7.x).

DOS in Virtual PC is very poorly emulated, most games won't work right. DOSBox emulates DOS immensely better; I recommend you to give it another spin.

I gave up on virtual

I have a 1.5 tera HD. I split 500 gig of it off to a new hard drive "Z:" and formatted it.

I am not sure what to do now. I have the windows 98 cd. I want to install windows 98 onto the Z: drive and be able to boot into it with a couple clicks.

I am doing research to figure out how to do this but any help would be appreciated.

I am using a tutorial on this site
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...dows-7-xp.html

I am confused about drivers specifically.

If I boot from win 98 cd and tell it install on the new partition which is on the same hard drive as my original C: drive, how will I get drivers onto the Z: drive the new one that I'm sticking win 98 on?

Ok I am watching this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiL7eZOi7qM
"Install Windows 7 in Dual Boot with Pre-installed Windows XP"

Dude makes out like all you do is stick the windows cd in and tell it to install to the newly partitioned drive.

If this is true only hangup I can see is it might not like that I am going from XP to 98 from what I have read. Going to try install now.

Ok the step I'm at now

I am trying to boot from cd but it keeps going to my HDD no matter what I do. I even went into the bios, changed the order and saved. No dice. So I am trying to troubleshoot that.

In theory I can install win 98 onto the other partition. Then it will launch me into one of the OS's. Then I can install a program ecb something that will let me pick which drive to boot into. Its all a load of s--- but if it gets me to a place where I can play my favorite games with music it will be worth it.

Ok I have tried for a couple hours now to get this thing to boot off of CD. I can't figure out whats wrong. The best I could get it to do was act like it was going to do something then spit out a long string of numbers in the black screen and something about IDE and Intel.

I noticed in my BIOS I can move my USB drives up to boot off them.

My question is, what would I stick on this USB drive to where the computer is going to be able to detect it on startup if I do make the USB drive my first go to for startup?

Would it be Windows98 in .iso format?

Well, that's a great answer and a great reason to dive into that. :OK:

Once you manage to get WinXP running I strongly recommend that you visit and follow this guide ( How To Configure Dos For Gaming, which you can find in our tutorial subforum in our Troubleshooting forum in case the link don't work) so you can set up your autoexec.bat and config.sys files so they work in DOS. You can also use Win98 DOS mode which is not really DOS but an extended version of it made specially for Win98. If you configure those aforementioned config files you will be able to play DOS games normally. If you don't you'll be likely to face the exact same problems you mentioned before.

Yes, Disblo II is not that old and was released for Windows XP. Magic Shandalar was released for MS-DOS though.

In Windows XP most of the time I simply use VDMSound and it work just as well.

Info available on our site About VDMSound AFAIK.

DOSBox pretty much simply emulate DOS. I've never had problems with it but I know there is some games which won't work in DOSBox.

However, if you think that playing with DOS is going to be that much easier to run DOS games... You obviously never played games in DOS back in the days. I did. I often spent almost as much time making games run than I did playing them. Prepare yourself for a steep learning curve...

Sorry, can't help you with that. But I know it can be done.

It's possible that your Windows installation CD is not bootable. To make sure you could remove your hard disk from the boot sequence altogether (not just move it down), and if none of your other drives in the list are bootable, you'll know because your computer will fail to boot with a clear error message ("no boot disk/media" or something like that). You can always get back to the BIOS to restore the defaults.

If your CD isn't bootable you can certainly boot from a USB drive. It must be specially formatted or prepared. It's not just copying some files; and I don't think Windows does it. On this website you can download a program to make a USB bootable and add some diagnostic utilities in it:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/customize.html#usb

I've never set up Windows in multi-boot, but I think it doesn't provide a generic solution. If I'm not wrong, when you proceed to install a newer version of Windows and you already have an older one, you may get the option to set up a dual boot, instead of erasing the older one. In other cases Windows doesn't provide multi-boot, as far as I know.

I think there are Unix-like boot loaders that give you greater flexibility, specially if you want to dual boot between 'nix and Windows, but I don't know if they help you with installing two different Windows versions. One of these might be what you found.

Virtual PC is far easier than any of this. Your BSOD is a symptom of a problem not particular to VPC, that you should try to solve anyway.

Please note that if you install Windows 98 in your real machine to play DOS games, you may find that they don't work properly because your CPU is too fast or any other hardware issue.

The "DOS mode" in Windows 9x (when you re-boot into the command line) is indeed completely real DOS. Only it's DOS version 7.x.

I don't know about an USB stick... But in the good old DOS days doing "format a: /s" did the trick.

Of course it format your disk, so don't keep important data on it if you do try!

As Japo says, most probably it means that your CD is not bootable. I seen it several times, with self-written CDs, that must be bootable, and even is bootable in some systems - but not another. Had no luck in deciphering what is the reason of it, so usually I am taking another CD in such cases.
Basically, you can put content of Win98 CD on USB. As far as you can boot into command prompt, you can start setup.exe manually. But I have no idea how to make it bootable. Hope, Japo's links will be good for you.
Error. Twice. :D

Both games are from Win98 era, and made for that. Also, MtG have some problems on XP - two can be fixed with proper setting and ACT, third is too elusive, happens on rare systems and have something with low-level drivers conflict. :)
Well, actually, WinXP is unaware about Vista/Win7 (obviously), so installing XP surely mess with Win7 anyway.

But usual fix with windowses is re-install 7 over win98 on the same place where it was. If dual boot is supported on Win7 (I have no idea, honestly), you will get working dual boot system. :)
Second here. I abandoned my 98 after that it become incompatible with my motherboard. Having generic video and lot of non-recognized peripheral is not very fun, actually. Also, it behave... fuzzy with RAM over 2GB. And you need partition your disk in FAT32, as NTFS supported only from XP and up.

Been there , done that, ditched the whole multi boot from one HD.
Solution:
Save yourself some serious hassle, get a HD rack, and switch your HD.
As many OSses as you want without any troubles.

http://thumbnails104.imagebam.com/26...4267004429.jpg

BTW:
Won't work with an USB stick, you need a special soft to make it bootable.
Contrary to flops USB sticks don't have a specific boot sector located at cylinder 0/head 0/sector 1 , the soft needs to create a boot sector so that the Mobo can find and read it upon boot.

But anyway, a USB stick is really too slow to run an OS from it.
It's only interesting for OS install purposes, nothing more.

The soft I usually use to create a bootable USB stick is Rufus (Win).
http://rufus.akeo.ie/
Or in Linux UNetbootin
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

My two cents........

After the death of floppy, the "/S" parameter is even gone from format.com in recent versions of Windows (rather, it now means enable/disable short filename support). And sys.com is gone altogether.

What I meant is that if Windows supports multi-boot, it's only when installing newer on top of older, not the other way around, and maybe both versions have to be consecutive... But again I never tried, and even in that case it may depend on many silly factors, your particular installation disk, maybe even including if it's a Home or Pro, OEM or retail edition...

This is by far the hardest method to achieve your goal, IMO.

OT: What a coincidence, I just got this laptop for free from someone at work :)
http://www.toshiba-europe.com/bv/com...t/product.shtm