Untitled thread

[Bebelos 0]

TITLE: Windows 2000 to Win98 and virtual machines

 

I have Windows 2000 Professional installed on my new machine.

Many of my favorite games (and other software) will not run. Microsoft refuses to get back to be on why SP2 for Win 2000 will not install for my OS. SP2 contains a DLL designed for backwards compatibility, and it's a bit buggy.

 

It has been suggested elsewhere in these forums that it is possible to us VMware's VMWorkstation to do this.

Do not seriously consider this as a solution. There will be so many problems making it work and paying the licensing fee only for this purpose is a bit ridiculous. I could list VMware's faults here but take my advice, i.e., a two-month+ response time to technical problems is professionally unacceptable.

 

I spent 10 hours downloading the trial version (their servers cut out five times) and four hours reading through the forums at their website. It's just not worth the trouble and expense.

 

Here is an engineers solution that is much simpler.

 

-Bebelos

Keep your old drive with Windows 98 installed (all of my stuff worked on Win98). All bios's that I know in use today can auto-detect HD configurations.

 

Turn off your computer, swap the drives, and as long as your BIOS is set to auto-detect the master drive - you're all set.

 

When you have the time, (and a large enough HD), set it up for dual-boot - then no more drive swapping.

 

Simple, and no VMware or VirtualPC required.

 

-Bebelos

[TomyLobo 0]

some BIOS allow you to boot from other drives than primary master

try setting it to boot from drive D (that's primary slave) or E (that's secondary master). The BIOS should swap the drives by itself then

[Wicked101 0]

There is no need to fiddle with the BIOS, if you have 2 hard drives install both of them, make one (the one for WIN98) Primary Master and the second one (the one for 2000) Primary Slave.

Then you can install 98 first and then 2000, make sure to select the second HDD to install 2000 on and that way you can dual boot without using VMware or VirtualPC or playing around in the BIOS.

If your 2000 HDD will be formatted with NTFS you will be able to see the WIN98 HDD from 2000 but you wont see the 2000 HDD from 98 unless you format it with FAT32

[jmmijo 1]

and my favorite one of them all, I have a few older DOS boxes and a couple of somewhat speedier machines for Win 9x

 

I just love my old Ensonique Soundscape ISA card for games