Creating a Win98 virtual machine (vmware)

Probably thanks to my stubborn nature, I just went though a rather interesting adventure trying to get Win98 installed into vmware.

It was for a friend and not really what I needed to be doing today, but there it is, so be it. After all I went through, I wanted to write up the steps involved in case (for some ungodly reason) I needed to do it again or in case someone else comes across the same problem.

VMWare Workstation gives you the ability to create a virtual machine for Win98 ? so does the online site for making a VM (http://www.easyvmx.com).

The problem I had is that the disk I had for Win98 was not bootable ? it had Win98 as well as an update to it but cannot be used to boot and the VMWare process for installing an OS is to use a bootable disk.

Instead of being bootable, the CD simple had a Win98/setup directory with setup.exe in it. Perhaps there is someway to get vmware to run that directly, but I didn't find it.

I looked for ways to try to make something bootable out of the CD, but got nowhere. However, I did find a way to do get it installed, though it depends on having a floppy drive which is more than a little unusual these days. I happened to have a USB floppy drive I could use for this. So, here is the outline of the process:

1. Create a bootable DOS floppy. I did this by doing the following:

(a)http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm: Downloaded the Windows 98 bootable executable.

(b)Got a clean floppy and put it in the floppy drive. This is done by running the executable downloaded from the above page and letting it install a bootable image onto the floppy.

2. But, for whatever reason, when I set my VM to go to the floppy drive, did not recognize it ? I'm guessing because the floppy is a USB though I couldn't swear to that.

3. Since I couldn't go directly to the floppy ? and so the VM would not boot from the floppy -- I downloaded a tool to create an image of a bootable floppy:

http://www.towodo.com/products/floppyimage/

I used that to create a floppy image and then pointed the VM's floppy drive to that .img file. This got me to the point of booting to an A prompt though I couldn't see the CD yet in order to run the setup.exe.

You point the VM to the floppy image in VMWare Workstation by specifying the image file in the Virtual Machine settings. I used:

F:\temp\win98floppy\win98.img

though you might need to make the change in the VMWare confi file (.vmx) if you're not VMPlayer:

floppy0.fileName = ?F:\temp\win98floppy\win98.img?

With this in place, I got to the A prompt.

4. Once I got the the A prompt, the next problem was that I didn't seem to be able to get to the CD drive, though in fact it might have worked ? it might have appeared not to work because I didn't try the right drive letter (which I realized later seems to have been set to ?R?).

Look in the autoexec.bat file on the actual floppy and look for the line that invokes MSCDEX.EXE which sets up the CD drive to be viewed. Check for the /L flag which I believe seems the drive letter for the CD. The default was set to R which I never checked.

5. Because I couldn't get to the CD drive, I went looking for info on how to get there and found the following:

http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm#standalone

The steps from here are to:

(a) Copy the OAKCDROM.SYS (41 K) file to your floppy disk

(b) Add the fillowing line to the CONFIG.SYS file DEVICE=OAKCDROM.SYS /D:mscd001

(c) Add the fillowing line to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001

(In the section on adding a generic CD ROM Driver.) That's what I applied.

Note: Interestingly, the info right above this on that page concerns creating a bootable CD. That might also work instead of downloading the bootable Win98 image I named above.

6. Of course, once I made changes to config.sys and autexec.bat as per the reference to get to the CD above, I needed to re-create the floppy image.

7. With the floppy image and the CD ROM handled as per the above, I was able to boot the VM to the A prompt, then go to the CD, but trying to run /win98/setup/setup.exe ran into an error that there was no DOS Disk to install onto.

8. To handle this, see:

http://biberdorf.com/linux/thinkpad/win98boot.html

in particular the ?Use the CD? section which gives instructions on how to run FDISK to partition the virtual disk for Windows and then run format to format the disk. (NOTE: The instructions on this page might also be able to be used to create a bootable CD by using some of the other pieces I described above including creating the bootable floppy image.) In short, from the A prompt run:

FDISK

then,

FORMAT C: /s

9. With that done, you'll then be able to navigate to the CD's /Win98/Setup directory and run setup.exe.

At various points in the install, the VM will need to reboot. In order to make this happen, change the VM's configuration so the floppy no longer points at the Image file ? set it to ?Auto detect? so that it fails and goes to the virtual C drive to boot.

I think the above are the key pieces of it ? with that done I actually got a Win98 VM set up and running. I must say, it looks pretty primitive after running on 2000, XP and a bit of Vista for the last few years. It is also remarkable small ? only taking up about 170 meg on the hard drive (oh, for those days!!!).