Getting Win98 back ( 4 now )
 

Had a PII system at work that started to physically fry itself.

Removed the hard disk and subsequently found it to be sound .

In another up to date system I installed winXP and xandos ( 4 now)

Physically installed the win98 hard drive as slave into this system before installing linux.

Lilo recognized win98 OK but when I try to boot into it - no noise at all.

So I suspect that win98 doesn't understand the new motherboard - maybe.

What I would like to do is to be able to boot win98 because of some propriety software installed there. I am able to see the hard drive and all the file system OK so no worries there at present.

I do know that if I use a rescue disk that I will lose the capability of running some of these programs. One thought is to copy the registry ( when I can remember where it is ) - rescue the win98 installation and then rewrite the registry with the saved one. I have been running linux ( Mandrake10 Official at present ) for so long now that I have forgotten most of this stuff.

Anyone here been able to get something like this to work?

And yes, if neseccary I am prepared to re-install linux. The folk at work like things straight forward and a basic installation of a good GUI linux distro will get them using and eventually accepting linux.

To recap, how can I boot win98 on hdb1 when win98 had been installed from a previous hardware system, without having to re-install win98?

I think that the problem is that Win98 expects to be booting from the first partition on a master drive; it doesn't want to boot from a slave drive.

A while back, I had to boot a Win2k install from a slave drive; I followed this AnandTech tutorial on dualbooting Windows and Linux. Even though you are trying to boot Win98, you should try the tutorial.

In summary, you need to add this to lilo.conf:

other=/dev/hdb1
label=Windows98
table=/dev/hdb
map-drive = 0x80
to = 0x81
map-drive = 0x81
to = 0x80

If that doesn't work, then I can't help you further.

Thanks for the reply, I believe the "table" entry is missing from the new system. Will try this tomorrow with crossed fingers.

My concern still remains, can booting the Win98 work when it was initially installed on another hardware system?

Do you mean install Windows in one machine, then remove the hard drive and put that hard drive in another PC and boot with it? Short answer is yes, I did it once and it worked. Needless to say, drivers and other stuff you've installed may conflict with the new hardware specially with "plug and pray", but it's no big deal. Also, I'm not sure if this would _always_ work or if I just had luck :)

Good luck!

It generally works on Windows 98 and below, but if you try it on 2000 or XP, you'll get a BSOD while booting [in my experience] :)

Cool, thanks for sharing Bencrest! :) I've never tried with Win2k or XP myself...

The table entry was indeed the missing component. Thanks for that all.

And now onto the main problem.

I can now run Netscape Communicator 4.73 and am disapponited in finding no export feature.

Basically, I need to get more than 1.2 Gigabytes of emails out of this beast and viewable, workable within the WinXP installation on the primary hard drive.

( To late boss - Linux is already installed on the primary hard drive also - so no allocating resources once we've got things working again - it wasn't possible without Linux in the first place. )

I see only *.snm files within the Netscape folder and cannot find any *.sbd files within the Mozilla 1.7.3 folder at all, so by way of "merging manually" appears lost to me at this stage.

Anyone with any sort of a work-around to do this? Getting the new email client to see and use the old email is what is required as that email came with attachments of dwg files and the like.

Again, thanks for the interest, greatly appreciated.