Installing Windows 98SE on SSD

Deleted member 831638

Joined
May 8, 2019
Messages
226
Reaction score
44
Points
97
I know some people will ask why am I wanting to install Windows 98 to an SSD... Retro computing has been a big thing in recent years and there are people who want to use a retro PC for all kinds of retro things that a modern PC can't do, or can't do well. Some will say "just use virtual box" Its not the same and takes away the nostalgia because your using a modern PC. I am a retro computer enthusiast.

Although its nice to have things period correct on a retro machine, that is not always possible and sometimes a modern piece of hardware like an SSD is needed to maintain the functionality of a retro system via an IDE to SATA adapter made for retro tech. Old spinning hard drives are failing from many years of use although you can still get some that still have a decent amount of life still in them but many have failed or will fail.

I know somebody will point out that you'd never benefit from the full speed of an SSD on a retro computer with the IDE interface being one of the limitations but come, we are using Windows 98, having the optimum speed is not necessary. The whole point of an SSD is to have a fully working usable retro PC that can be enjoyed for many more years.

Why not use a SD Card or CF Card via an adapter? I see a lot of people doing just this, and yes it will work but for how long is another question entirely. Those two options have got to be one of the worse solutions because SD cards and CF cards are not designed for that kinda use and often die relatively quickly, some might last longer than others, CF cards will take a bit more punishment than an SD card but the inevitable will happen because the storage devices are being thrashed from all the writes they are doing when used as a hard drive. The first signs will be strange errors or crashes and then blue screens then failure to re-format, re-install the OS. Yes you can get industrial grade SD cards and CF cards but those will also fail, you might get away with it on a DOS only system or Windows 3.1 at a push you might be fine.

This is where SSD shines because they have been made for the purpose. Running Windows 98 will be no sweat for an SSD although Windows 98 doesn't support TRIM, that presents an issue but there are practical work around's which makes SSD a god send for a retro system with a failing, or failed hard drive. Some solid state drives are better than others, some even have TRIM built into them. An SSD may need to be maintained on an OS like Windows 98 with everything partitioned correctly.

I've got a few retro machines that I'm going to be resurrecting, none have hard drives and I've got some SSD's.
 
I doubt Windows 98 will have driver support for SSDs, so I believe you are out of luck
It may work, but then you will not have TRIM, which may limit SSD life.
As for virtual machine, why not? You can run a windows 98 game at 10 FPS on old hardware, or 60 FPS on new hardware
 
I'm not sure if you're asking if it's possible or making a statement but it is possible to some level, friends doing this have used IDE SSDs for Win98 builds but it is possible with a SATA SSD as MattKC on Youtube used one for his ultimate 98 PC builds.
 
I have used SATA hard drives on socket 775 Windows 98 builds. Windows 98 will still work with SATA hard drives whether that be a solid state drive or a SATA spinning drive, no drivers are required for SATA hard drives under Windows 98, however optical SATA drives will not work under Windows 98 so optical drives have to be IDE. All my boards have IDE on them so I've never attempted to use a SATA optical drive under Windows 98 but I have used SATA hard drives under Windows 98 which work without any issues just like an IDE drive.
 
I doubt Windows 98 will have driver support for SSDs, so I believe you are out of luck
It may work, but then you will not have TRIM, which may limit SSD life.
As for virtual machine, why not? You can run a windows 98 game at 10 FPS on old hardware, or 60 FPS on new hardware
A SATA SSD will work just fine under Windows 98. What is the point in using virtual machines, you may as well not bother because its just just lazy with no nostalgia or anything. No real Sound Blaster sound. No creativity or imagination.

Building or maintaining a retro PC is not only fun but you learn a lot about things during the builds and experiments which can lead to creating other things. Its kinda like an artist with a blank canvas, its not just about playing a few retro games. There is so much more too it.
 
A SATA SSD will work just fine under Windows 98. What is the point in using virtual machines, you may as well not bother because its just just lazy with no nostalgia or anything. No real Sound Blaster sound. No creativity or imagination.

Building or maintaining a retro PC is not only fun but you learn a lot about things during the builds and experiments which can lead to creating other things. Its kinda like an artist with a blank canvas, its not just about playing a few retro games. There is so much more too it.
If you are ok Facebook look for this group, loads of people doing exactly what you are planning and very helpful with building retro systems

3D67897B-5659-4AB5-9069-0A93C8830EBD.png
 
What is the point in using virtual machines, you may as well not bother because its just just lazy with no nostalgia or anything
Stick your PC in a brown case. Jobs a good un. Nostalgia galore.
 
I put together a couple of Win98 builds a couple of years back. One was an Intel socket 478 and the other an AMD 939 which was my dads old machine. It takes a lot of time and patience to get everything working with the correct drivers and I remember having several failed attempts. The most annoying failure for me was that installing the usb driver (win32usb or something like that) made the whole system brick. I just gave up with that in the end and removed the hdd whenever I wanted to install something new.

If you do use an SSD how do you get around the fact that Win98 will only recognise drives up to a certain size? Also is there a recommended version of Windows to use? I was using some version of Win98SE. I found PhilsComputerLab to be a really good resource.
 
I put together a couple of Win98 builds a couple of years back. One was an Intel socket 478 and the other an AMD 939 which was my dads old machine. It takes a lot of time and patience to get everything working with the correct drivers and I remember having several failed attempts. The most annoying failure for me was that installing the usb driver (win32usb or something like that) made the whole system brick. I just gave up with that in the end and removed the hdd whenever I wanted to install something new.

If you do use an SSD how do you get around the fact that Win98 will only recognise drives up to a certain size? Also is there a recommended version of Windows to use? I was using some version of Win98SE. I found PhilsComputerLab to be a really good resource.
I've done lots of retro builds and challenges are all part of it. I don't give up easily. The USB driver has always worked fine for me. Were you using the unofficial service packs? Those can sometimes mess things up. Windows 98 can recognize up to 128 GB drives which is plenty. I normally use low capacity drives, I have some 64GB SSD's which I'm planing on using for retro builds. 64GB is still plenty. You can get away with using much larger drives than 128GB in Windows 98 if you partition them correctly, there are also some patches you can download to allow you to have larger drives andeven more RAM not that there would be any benefit to it.

There is no need to get around Windows 98 not seeing anything larger than 128GB drives.
 
I've done lots of retro builds and challenges are all part of it. I don't give up easily. The USB driver has always worked fine for me. Were you using the unofficial service packs? Those can sometimes mess things up. Windows 98 can recognize up to 128 GB drives which is plenty. I normally use low capacity drives, I have some 64GB SSD's which I'm planing on using for retro builds. 64GB is still plenty. You can get away with using much larger drives than 128GB in Windows 98 if you partition them correctly, there are also some patches you can download to allow you to have larger drives andeven more RAM not that there would be any benefit to it.

There is no need to get around Windows 98 not seeing anything larger than 128GB drives.

Yeah I think I might have been using the unofficial service packs so will have to revisit the build at some stage. I do have all of the drivers stored so it should be much easier next time. I also have a spare 64GB SSD lying around so might give that a go too. The PC's are both stored away at the minute as I currently have my modern pc and a Windows XP machine setup. The XP machine works like a dream and was super easy to setup using Snappy Driver Install.
 
There was a few videos running windows 98 via dospure emulation in retroarch ... might be a simple solution to emulate the PC rather than actually set one up

 
Ironically the computer system in the picture above is an Acorn A5000, the second generation of the Archimedes.
They were nice computers. I was given one by a school in 1999 and it ran RISC OS. There worth a lot of money now.
 
Although its nice to have things period correct on a retro machine, that is not always possible and sometimes a modern piece of hardware like an SSD is needed to maintain the functionality of a retro system via an IDE to SATA adapter made for retro tech. Old spinning hard drives are failing from many years of use although you can still get some that still have a decent amount of life still in them but many have failed or will fail.

Through many years of experience, if you're thinking of installing anything earlier than Windows 7 on an SSD, don't.

The reason is a technical one but is quite simple. Pre-Win7, NTFS used 512 byte sectors. All SSDs use 4096 byte sectors, fixed in hardware.

As a 'sector' on an SSD is equivalent to a 4k memory cell, the file system sectors need to align with the hardware cells, as well as being the same size. If you install, say, WinXP on an SSD, even if the sector boundaries align with the memory cell boundaries, each memory cell will contain 8 file system sectors. Writing a contiguous file to the file system will result in a write amplification factor of 8. And that's assuming you get the sectors aligned correctly.

If the boundaries don't align the problem is even worse.

The installer and formatter for Windows 7 onwards can handle 4096 byte sectors and takes care of this for you.

If you're trying to run with a FAT32 file system then it'll be worse still, as there's no support for journalling or sparse files.

Sadly your best bet is going to be to install Windows 98 etc into a Hyper-V session. The VHD can be in FAT32 format, the host OS will use aggressive caching to maximise performance in the virtual machine. As the VHD file is stored on an NTFS volume with 4096 byte sectors, write-behind cache etc, it will eliminate these problems.

Note that Hyper-V is virtualization, not emulation. There's a big difference.
 
They were nice computers. I was given one by a school in 1999 and it ran RISC OS. There worth a lot of money now.

I've got 3 working A5000 systems, an A4000, two A3000s, and some of the newer kit like the RiscPC and A7000. Used to use them a lot, now all sat stored in the spare room.

RISC OS 5 will run on a Raspberry Pi. The Pi Zero costs £5 and will hand the RiscPC (over £1000 when new) its arse on a plate for performance. That's progress.
 
just reminded me I have a windows 98 PC in the loft, around 11 years ago I worked for a while doing tech Q&A on kit prior to its commercial release and needed to have all Windows OS's from 98 onwards. cannot recall what spec the PC was, The PC was built from my spare parts kept from older gaming PC I made, likely from around 2005. Would be an intel cpu as I favoured them back then. it will be on a HDD of course, wonder if it still boots ?

If I remember its in a CHIEFTEC DRAGON case looks like this (this is a pic from the internet as I cannot be bother to find it in the loft just yet)

I need to clear the loft out so I will grab it down at some point.

6v5zo2smv4981.jpg
 
Last edited:
I've got 3 working A5000 systems, an A4000, two A3000s, and some of the newer kit like the RiscPC and A7000. Used to use them a lot, now all sat stored in the spare room.

RISC OS 5 will run on a Raspberry Pi. The Pi Zero costs £5 and will hand the RiscPC (over £1000 when new) its arse on a plate for performance. That's progress.
I have built my own RISC OS PC inside an old POS system that died, the power supply was still good and has 5volts to power a Pi board. I made a custom plate on the back for VGA, PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard and USB ports.

The only issue I had was working out if I could use the HD LED indicator with the Pi and I wanted to boot from a hard drive via the USB port on the Pi inside the machine rather than booting from SD card and running the OS from the SD Card. The ROMS would be ok on the SD card but the OS itself I wanted to run from an SSD/hard drive and also re-use the 3.5inch floppy drive via the USB on the Pi board.
 
Through many years of experience, if you're thinking of installing anything earlier than Windows 7 on an SSD, don't.

The reason is a technical one but is quite simple. Pre-Win7, NTFS used 512 byte sectors. All SSDs use 4096 byte sectors, fixed in hardware.

As a 'sector' on an SSD is equivalent to a 4k memory cell, the file system sectors need to align with the hardware cells, as well as being the same size. If you install, say, WinXP on an SSD, even if the sector boundaries align with the memory cell boundaries, each memory cell will contain 8 file system sectors. Writing a contiguous file to the file system will result in a write amplification factor of 8. And that's assuming you get the sectors aligned correctly.

If the boundaries don't align the problem is even worse.

The installer and formatter for Windows 7 onwards can handle 4096 byte sectors and takes care of this for you.

If you're trying to run with a FAT32 file system then it'll be worse still, as there's no support for journalling or sparse files.

Sadly your best bet is going to be to install Windows 98 etc into a Hyper-V session. The VHD can be in FAT32 format, the host OS will use aggressive caching to maximise performance in the virtual machine. As the VHD file is stored on an NTFS volume with 4096 byte sectors, write-behind cache etc, it will eliminate these problems.

Note that Hyper-V is virtualization, not emulation. There's a big difference.
Thanks for the info... Thats too bad I'll just take my chances and see what happens. If I have to use a virtual machine then there is no point. I like retro tech, I'm not a fan of virtual machines.
 
No real Sound Blaster sound. No creativity or imagination.

I have had Sound Blaster working correctly, you can emulate AWE32 for example with the additional memory if you want (I used my old Atari STe memory in mine when I had a real one). Can also do the Gravis Ultrasound too which I always fancied at the time.
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom