Dual booting Windows 98 with Windows 7.

JumpShivers

Is it possible to dual boot Windows 98 with Windows 7?
The latter is 64 bit and the former is 16 bit obviously. Would this pose a problem?

is it possible to decide myself how much of the drive is partitioned for the Windows 98 or will it automatically be 50:50

Will this make me vulnerable to hackers or cyber crime or will the windows 7 support the windows 98 on the other side of the drive too?

Is this a windows 98 OS? Will is be a CD or a floppy?

http://goo.gl/1zvvh7

Thanks everyone.

degsie

You do know we're on windows 10 now, right?

Falthyron

The most important question of all: Why?!

316

degsie wrote: »

You do know we're on windows 10 now, right?

Maybe op does, would you ask the same kind of question to someone who drives a classic car?

long_b

Would you not run Windows 98 on a virtual machine in Windows 7 instead?

the_syco

My answers in bold;

JumpShivers wrote: »

Is it possible to dual boot Windows 98 with Windows 7? Don't see why not.
The latter is 64 bit and the former is 16 bit obviously. Would this pose a problem? No; W7 will use NTFS, and W98 would use FAT32.

is it possible to decide myself how much of the drive is partitioned for the Windows 98 or will it automatically be 50:50 Whatever you choose

Will this make me vulnerable to hackers or cyber crime or will the windows 7 support the windows 98 on the other side of the drive too?How about you don't install network drivers for W98?

Is this a windows 98 OS? Will is be a CD or a floppy? W98 usually comes on a CD

http://goo.gl/1zvvh7

Thanks everyone.

But why would you install W98?

Alanstrainor

long_b wrote: »

Would you not run Windows 98 on a virtual machine in Windows 7 instead?

This has to be the only logical answer to this. And obviously that is, if there is a reason to run 98 at all...

seamus

There may be formatting issues with the MBR between the 16 bit and 64 bit address space. Win 98 will only be able to identify 64GB of disk space at most. Thus it may not be possible to create an entry for both OSes in the MBR.

If you're insistent on this, you should probably use a 3rd party boot loader like http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Though like others say, the smart way to do this would be to run Win98 as a virtual machine in VirtualBox or similar. It might even run faster as a VM than as a standalone install.

Digital Solitude

Definitely as a VM.

Would an x16 OS run natively on an x64-x86 chip?

seamus

Digital Solitude wrote: »

Would an x16 OS run natively on an x64-x86 chip?

It should. The biggest problems you're going to run into are not the chip itself, but the motherboard architecture. Everything from your internal hard drives to your PCI bridge, Windows 98 will either be unable to use it at all (e.g. if the drives are SATA) or will install the most basic of drivers that barely functions.

Chances are you will have to enable some form of compatibility mode for almost everything in the BIOS, to make Win98 work.

The end result being that you will have two OSes that run like complete hogs or barely function at all.

Hence why a VM will likely run faster than a direct install.

superelliptic

seamus wrote: »

There may be formatting issues with the MBR between the 16 bit and 64 bit address space. Win 98 will only be able to identify 64GB of disk space at most. Thus it may not be possible to create an entry for both OSes in the MBR.

If you're insistent on this, you should probably use a 3rd party boot loader like http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Though like others say, the smart way to do this would be to run Win98 as a virtual machine in VirtualBox or similar. It might even run faster as a VM than as a standalone install.

^Best answer so far.

Windows 7 cannot "protect" windows 98 if you make separate partitions. If you install '98 that way then the only 'protections' available to you will be those available to '98 in the form of Windows Updates and the like. But that's a bad idea since Microsoft stopped supporting '98 in 2006.

The smart option as Seamus pointed out is to download/buy a (preferably CD) copy of Windows '98 and install it as a virtual machine running within Windows 7 - i.e. you would install Win7 as your only OS, and boot into it as normal. You would then load up a virtual copy of '98 within windows using VirtualBox.

Heres a video on how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRAQabqyQXQ

PropJoe10

I love these threads. Reminds me of that legendary Windows 95 thread that pops up now and again

Seriously OP, instal 98 in a VM if you really must. Just make sure to keep it off the Internet.

yoyo

Windows 98 may not play nice with newer hardware, should work in a VM though. Funny enough there are actually plenty of very expensive machines that will only work on Win 98 out there. I remember a few years back doing a bit of IT work for a college one summer. They had some medical hardware/device I think it was, that cost a fortune and it would not work on Windows 2000 or XP.
They actually have a couple of old P3 and P4 machines at the ready so when one fails they just bin it and set up the next one. It was kept off the network for obvious reasons

Nick

A VM is your only way now. Here's some of the issues you'd run into when trying to boot Windows 98 on modern hardware:

CPU speed: Could run into timing issues on fast CPUs. Windows 95 won't boot on anything faster than 350 MHz (AMD) or 1.1 GHz (Intel) without a patch.

RAM: Officially the OS won't boot on anything more than 768MB of RAM, but I've gotten Windows 95 to boot on 948MB and not even 1MB more. You'd have to cap it in the system.ini file, as well as limiting vcache, though my memory is hazy as to what you cap it at.

Drivers: No drivers for any modern hardware, such as video cards, sound cards or network cards.

Storage: No SATA support (though you may get away with SATA drives in IDE emulation mode). No native support for 48-bit LBA disks, so 128GB per disk is the highest you can go. No NTFS support, FAT12/16/32 only.

unkel

Virtualisation might not work for what the OP wants to do. I would pick up a free very old PC on adverts (or dig one up from the attic / family etc.) and install W98 on that. And make sure you never connect it to any network, particularly not the internet!

Gyck

I use a Win98 VM to run Total Annihilation and Alpha Centauri.