I saw a few ways of running windows98 off cd and thought it would be possible to do something similar on my crippled laptop instead of using geexbox for playing videos. (Geexbox works pretty well except for some occasional stuttering and lack of tv-out for my card)

So I installed windows 98 into a virtual machine, drivespaced and ultra-packed it, threw the image onto a cd-rw along with isolinux and tried it out. It booted, but I had issues with the cd drive not working afterwards. the floppy drive not responding and other failures. I wasted time trying to fix it for quite a while, when I finally decided to replace isolinux with grub4dos. Almost all of my problems dissappeared, the only one that remained was being unable to use the quick restart trick and exit to dos. I did run into a problem with virtual disk partition size > actual size, but I think that can be fixed by a fresh image. (the one I was using got converted between several formats and it was after one of these that the issue appeared, the ramdisk driver disabled any writes past the image boundary)

I installed an unofficial usb mass storage support package and transfered the drivers for the laptop across and installed them. (one by one) Every time windows asked for a restart, I opened up a dos window and used attrib -R-H-S on drvspace.000 and copied it to the usb stick. I then re-injected it into the image on the pc and reburned the cdrw. (Using the windows copy results in an instant freeze, you have to use the dos one)

After installing the drivers, I hit a major snag. I didn't have enough enough space to install CCCP even though I had 50 megs of compressed space. (even though CCCP is about 15 megs or so) I think this is from the bad image.

I recently found my lost windows 98 cd, so I can make a new image. I thought I'd stop at this point and ask some questions.

Is there any way to access a drivespace volume from xp to view or resize it? (I have been unable to find any)

Can I boot a windows 98 partition if it only contains files dumped from a image? (I don't know how to edit boot.ini on winxp)

If I could do this it would make this a lot easier, as most virtual machines don't support certain cpu calls, etc. or are very slow, which makes this into a major hassle.

If I get this completely working, I wouldn't mind in posting a guide somewhere if anyone is interested. (Someone else might have a use for windows 98 in a ramdisk. Unless you want to be horrified, don't ask me how much time this has taken. It shouldn't take anyone else as long since you won't likely be using a 450mhz p2 with an extremely slow burner and should be able to avoid the mistakes I made. )

Also, I'm not wasting my time with this am I? The only reason I'm using windows 98 is because it has the drivers I need, so it should work better than geexbox (I can accept using it if this is a failure/waste of time), it supports tv-out and as far as I know, windows xp doesn't work from a ramdisk.

Well, this project has died (I may revive it in the future) since i got a new computer. (Goodbye Pentium 2 450mhz!)

I never managed to solve the questions I had above. (I'm assuming that no one here had answers to them or I somehow scared people away from replying. )

So I guess I should at least post the steps I went through. (If anyone wants to try something similar, I'll provide any assistance I can.)

Requirements:
QEMU (you'll probably want a frontend as well)
Grub4Dos
Winimage 30-day trial or a equivalent free alternative

Cdrw (Unless you want to waste a cd each time you change something)
Usb Stick (at least 512mb to transfer drvspace.000 to build pc from target pc)

Steps:

- Create a new virtual disk (raw format) and install windows 98 into it using QEMU. (Run drivespace on it from within win98 and using the compression agent, ultrapack the files and then shrink the drivespace volume, leaving space for drivers and any programs you want)

-Using Winimage or equivalent, extract all the files from the image. Create a new image, then fdisk (make sure to mark it as bootable) it and format it. Inject the files from the other image and then load up QEMU and make sure it boots, if it does, download, inject and install these generic mass storage drivers.

- Set Grub4Dos up to use a disk image from memory

- Burn a cdrw with grub4dos as the boot loader with the image on it, include any necessary drivers (installers would be easiest).

- Boot the cd on target computer. Whenever it asks to reboot say no or later, etc. When you are ready to restart, insert your usb stick and using a dos window run attrib.exe -R -H -S on drvspace.000 (you'll have to unhide the host drive in drivespace) and then using the dos copy command, copy it to the stick. (do not use the windows command, it will lock up)

- After a while of just sitting there, it will say done. (the dos copy wont give a progress report)

- Remove the stick and shut down. Using the image program, inject drvspace.000 into the original image and reburn the cd/rw and boot again, this must be done to save your changes.

- After you've installed all drivers & programs (this would be the point to install applications) and windows is set up to your liking, then you should be done. (You only have to repeat the above 3 steps to save changes.)

- If you want, you can boot the image in qemu in safe mode (so the drivers don't get changed), shrink the drivespace volume, extract the files, make a new, smaller image and inject the files again. (make a backup of image first in case it won't work afterwards)

If anyone tries this and gets to a point where it seems I left something important out, please tell me.

This seems like a very cool project, I'm sorry it died. Also, somehow I missed this topic when you first posted it...

Um... why try so hard to get Win98 up and running of a CD? Linux LiveCD ftw!

Hell, a 450mhz P2 is still plenty for a linux server - get a big hard drive (500GB are only about $100 now) and make it a media server or similar.

I got it mostly finished, except for actually installing cccp and reinstalling the sound drivers. (I made a mistake by skipping a seemingly non essential file during driver install.) Other than that, it ran fine.

I may eventually revive it, though likely only out of curiosity than actual need.



I did try linux (geexbox livecd) on it, but it booted super slow since linux always insists that my laptop must be hiding a non-existing harddrive on all slots and tries to detect them for 5 minutes before giving up. Add that to the normal load time and thats around 10 minutes every time I want to watch something. I found that a windows 98 "livecd" that loaded an image to memory, booted it and ejected the cd, allowing use of the drive made more sense. (average boot time of around 5 min to load image, 2 seconds to desktop)

The only reason I used 98 was that it had drivers for the laptop so I could get tv-out (as far as I know, there is no way to do tv-out on a cyberblade/xp in linux) and use graphics acceleration, hopefully avoiding the occasional stutter in video I experienced.

I was using a amd mobile 900mhz laptop (lacking a hard drive and keyboard) for this project, not my old p2 desktop.

Also, I have a bit of a bias against linux. (Not because I don't know my way around a computer, but because it has never worked correctly for me. I hope this doesn't turn anyone against me. )

I tried ubuntu, but lack of support for my modem (linux driver for it is commercial, with a speed limited free version) coupled with 200mb+ updates did it in for me. LFS wouldn't compile for no apparent reason. (nobody on irc could assist with the strange error that apparently shouldn't have been happening) And wine wouldn't run apps that were supposed to work out of the box. (I really liked how they gave UT their highest compatibility rating even though certain things don't work. Platinum suggests 100% It didn't even work at all for me.)