An serial null modem cable is the cheapest option for just transferring data - but if none of your other machines have a serial port, you'd have to buy a USB to serial adaptor and that would add more cost.

To get anything installed (unless you can install over a serial console - you can with the BSDs, no idea with regards to Linux), you will need installation floppy disks (and of course a USB floppy drive for transferring data) - and most Linux distribution and the BSDs don't provide floppy disk images anymore. For example the last Debian floppy disk images were for Debian 4.0 which was released in 2007 (I know because I remember installing it on an old laptop).

Bear in mind that anything you install (except DOS/FreeDOS) is unlikely to outperform Windows 9x on that hardware.

Real Disk Partitioners beyond simple "fdisk" did not exist until Win7 iirc.


Gparted is a superb app for very solid, safe and intuitive partitioning work, as is it's sibling, Clonezilla, but neither of which will run from a floppy. Both of those are included in HirensBootCD v15 but OP does not (yet) have a CD drive. I do recall having a 2 x floppy bootable environment that included Partition Magic but that required one having bought the whole app which came on a CD.

FreeDOS is decently documented and retains the "foo /help" capability but more importantly incorporates a LOT of Linux. There is also no need for a VM since the simple versions run Live from a single floppy. A VM would be useful for the full CD version but that, too, requires a CD drive or substantial drive space to extract the iso which is why I think having a CD drive is so important, absent USB. In my memory the very first USB I ever saw was on a Socket 7 early Pentium mobo and it only had an internal pin header and it was at least a year or more before I could find an adapter to provide an actual port.

I don't recall any ISA extension boards providing USB since those coincided with PCI slots but since this is a laptop that point is moot. This is why I strongly recommend at the very least getting an external CD drive, though I'm not sure any exist without just getting another laptop that at least has USB. That really was a rather major breakthrough even if it wasn't originally as great as Firewire or SCSI.

Well "simple fdisk" is a "real disk partitioner" for MSDOS MBR partitions. It has been reimplemented and ported for the BSDs - the bottom of the FreeBSD man page has some history:

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?fdisk

I think it's possible to boot KolibriOS from within win98. Somewhere in my 'junk' pile I've got a few old 'Toughbooks' with '98 on them . I'll check tomorrow.

There is an install.txt with the version I have so I assume it is possible to dual boot it with '98 however I never did so. Here are pics of it running within win 98.

Attached Thumbnails

       

Any tips on doing that?

I mentioned "install" but I'm totally fine just "running" KolibriOS even just live.

This is from here:http://archive.kolibrios.org/en/

"
*** Releases from 0.6.0.0 to 0.7.1.0 include the loader nt2klbr.exe that allows to boot KolibriOS directly from Windows, replacing Windows. It uses its own driver to achieve that. Unfortunately, some antiviruses have decided to classify this behaviour as malicious without much thinking. Even more unfortunately, the Google company uses one of those antiviruses and marks sites containing such files, plus sites with links to sites containing such files, as malicious (in our case, it means that not only archive.kolibrios.org is marked, but also the main site kolibrios.org and all subdomains). The base created by Google is used by many other parties including Firefox and LetsEncrypt. We have no resources to convince an unknown antivirus that our behaviour is legitimate, to convince Google not to use paranoid antiviruses, to convince Firefox not to use Google's base, to convince users of Firefox and Google Chrome to move to another browser (such as Yandex.Browser) with an independent base of malicious sites. So we have been forced to remove some releases from our site. We still provide floppy images from these releases, floppy images include the system itself, but without some documentation, loaders and window skins."

It's been more than a decade since I d/l it but I think it was as simple as putting it in a folder and hitting the .exe. That said it was an old, standalone machine and I wasn't worried about viruses.

Thanks! Just one more question: Does this replace the filesystem or just the gui until you shut kolibri down?

Thanks again for the info.

Vaguely remember doing that - it will shut down W98 & load Kolibri - when you reboot, it will start up in W98 again, until you run Kolibri again.

+1 That's the way mine works. Click the .exe, in my case 9x2klbr, '98 shuts down cleanly, when you are through with Kolibri shut the machine down and next time you boot normally.

Prefect. I found the missing link on archive.org, those removed kolibri packages are still accessible from there.

Thanks again.