# Triple-booting W7/64, WXP, W98SE?



## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

My laptop is currently set up as a dual-boot machine, with a W7 Home Premium 64-bit o/s as the main o/s, and WXP SP3 32-bit as the other. I'd like to add Windows 98SE to that list in order to be able to run legacy programs.

My setup is:

MSI CR620
CPU: Intel Celeron P4600
VGA: Intel GMA HD
LED Panel: 15.6" HD 1366x768 (Glare Type)
RAM: DDRIII 8Gb @1066MHz
HDD: 911Gb

The hard drive is of course a SATA drive so I'm sure I'll need at least the drivers for that.

I know how to image my hard drive in case anything goes wrong. I'm also familiar with EasyBCD boot manager which I used to set up my dual-boot installation That's not going to be a problem.

But where to start? People have said that it's not a good idea to do this as the W98SE system can't often find 64-bit drivers, but surely if the system can run WXP 32-bit, then it has some 32-bit drivers there?

I think I will need to slipstream my W98 installation disc with some drivers, especially the SATA drivers (even my WXP install needed this!)

Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated!


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## Abriam26 (Jan 25, 2011)

I really do not recommend Windows 98 SE.
It is slow (well, it might be fast with your specs), but really simple..
It's useless nowadays


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

Yep, I know it is  But I'd like to try this.....


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

From what I recall, the windows bootloader will not support more than 2 entries [I may be wrong so do check] It would be possible to use a third party bootloader.

Next you are not going to be able to do this anyway since win9x becomes unstable when you have more 512 of ram. Since you list 8gig of ram in your specs, I do not believe you will be able to limit win9x to its requirement of ram. Even if you are able to install it AND the laptop maker has drivers for win9x [which I am sure it does not] it will be very unstable and basically unusable. In short give up on this idea.


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

Yes, I was going to use EasyBCD but if the driver and RAM issues are as insurmountable as you say, then perhaps not.....


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

Did you find win9x drivers on the support page for your laptop???


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

What a good idea. I will look! Thanks!


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## Rearden (Jan 15, 2013)

You could install Windows 98 in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.

http://www.virtualbox.org/


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

Wow, so many good ideas to follow up on. Thanks guys!


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

KingDrax said:


> What a good idea. I will look! Thanks!


I was making a joke; you are not going to find win9x drivers for anything mfg in the last 10yrs or so. It does not matter if you install as a virtual machine or not; if there are no drivers, you are wasting your time.


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

Oops <embarrassed> well ok then it looked like a good idea


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## Rearden (Jan 15, 2013)

crjdriver said:


> I was making a joke; you are not going to find win9x drivers for anything mfg in the last 10yrs or so. It does not matter if you install as a virtual machine or not; if there are no drivers, you are wasting your time.


I have to disagree with you on this. Virtual machine software uses virtualized hardware. It doesn't matter what physical hardware is on the host computer. I have personally installed Windows 98 in VirtualBox recently.


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

Even if it had virtual drivers for things like the touchpad, sound, lan, wireless, etc. It is still not going to get around the ram limit of win9x. Since he has 8gig, I would assume the laptop has 2x4gig chips. I would think this would cause a problem when you try to limit the amount of ram win9x uses.


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## KingDrax (Feb 23, 2013)

It does indeed have 2x4Gb RAM cards. However, would it be possible to configure the VirtualBox to emulate say 512Mb ram or similar, like how you can set the emulated RAM size in the Atari ST emulator 'Steem'?


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## Rearden (Jan 15, 2013)

You can limit the amount of RAM assigned to a virtual machine. All the other hardware you mentioned is virtualized and doesn't rely on the physical hardware.


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## jiml8 (Jul 3, 2005)

Windows 98 runs in VMWare Workstation, though as of last fall it is now a deprecated OS in VMWare. Therefore it should install and work fine as a virtual machine - in VMWare at least.

I run Windows 2000 (about the same age) every day as a virtual machine on a quad core Phenom-II with 8Gigs RAM and hosted in Linux. The Win2K VM gets 512 Meg RAM and one processor core. Works fine, and I still conduct much of my business (invoicing and checkwriting) in it. I still use Wordperfect 8, and I have a functioning Office 97 installation. I even still do a fair amount of development in it because it is so much faster than Win 7.


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