[Sfor]

This is a shortened guide of how to make a dual Xandros/Windows 98 system on an EEE PC while using just the flash drives. Pehaps it will be worth to add more details to it in the future and create a separate thread.

Before we begin.

Setting up a Windows 98 as a second OS along with factory Xandros Linux on Asus EEE PC is a bit complicated task. There are a few reasons for it.
- no built in FDD
- no built in CD drive
- it is not possible to change Grub OS loader settings from Xandros.

The XOSL is a boot manager capable of storing the original MBR in a file and swapping drives when booting. While using the swap drives function it will be possible to boot from a flash drive and then to change the boot drive to the built in drive. So, a FAT32 partition with Windows 98 system files could be booted without destroying the Xandros Grub boot loader, that way.

One or two bootable flash or USB HDD drives will be necesary. One drive with SysRescue CD and the other with Windows 98(9x) DOS mode files. (Or one dual boot drive with two partitions).

The DOS drive should contain XOSL, Windows 98 setup, SYS.COM and HIMEM.SYS files. And perhaps some DOS file manager (DOS Controller or Norton Commander). Also the XOSL should be installed on the DOS drive (preferably with the Rainish Partition manager).

The first thing to do is to upgrade the BIOS, as it works only when the factory partition layout is untouched. It will stop working after the FAT12 partition is deleted.

Installation

1. Boot the SysRescueCD and resize the the second EXT3 partition with GParted. The GUI is run through "startx" command. The GParted utility is accessible through context menu on the desktop.
GParted has some difficulties with handling FAT32 partitions. It failed in my case. So, other partition manager should be used to make the Windows 98 FAT32 partition.
2. Boot the DOS flash and start Rainish Partition manager from XOSL boot menu. Use (Ctrl-P) on the boot manager screen. Then Delete third FAT12 partition and create a new FAT32 in it's place.
3. Boot the DOS and put Windows 98 system files with SYS command to the new partition. Then copy the Windows 98 setup and HIMEM.SYS files there. (creation of a proper config.sys file could be necesary to make the HIMEM.SYS work).
4. Boot the DOS drive again. This time it will be necesary to add an additional boot option in the XOSL. Select the new FAT32 partition and check the "Swap drives" checkbox. It will make the new partition to be the C drive after booting. Then install the XOSL on the C drive. After a reboot The Xandros boot option will require to boot from the original MBR, while Windows 98 partition can be booted directly.
5. To setup Windows 98 boot the system from the new partition, then use the SETUPCOR.EXE, as the SETUP.EXE will not work on the EEE PC. Also the keyboard and touch pad will stop function after Windows 98 will do PnP devices check. It will be necesary to switch off the computer, when the date and time settings dialog is displayed. Luckily the setup will continu from the same point after booting the Windows 98, again.
6. After finishing the Windows 98 setup, it will be necesary to restore the XOSL and Xandros booting option, as Windows 98 destroyed the MBR OS loader durin the setup. In order to do so:
- Boot to the SysRescueCD again.
- mount the new FAT32 partition. An examplary commands are:
mkdir d
mount -t vfat /dev/sda3 d
cd d
- restore the Grub boot loader from orig_mbr.xcf file using DD
DD if=orig_mbr.xcf of=/dev/sda
- boot to Windows 98 as it was in the step 4 again and install the XOSL.

Now you should be able to boot to Windows 98 and Xandros at will using the XOSL.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 02 April 2009 - 02:15 AM

[Sfor]

The Windows 98 on my old Asus EEE PC 900 was made quite long ago with many small steps. Now, I've got to do the same in the best possible order.

Since the Windows 98 setup did not detected ACPI, it would be good to enable ACPI on as early stage as possible. The problem is the old and proven ACPI enabling procedure does not seem to be working. And I do not know why. Some things have to be installed first, probably. The ACPI support enabling procedure requires to reinstall all PnP device drivers. So, in order to reduce the time spent on the job, it would be good to do it as the first task.

[tomahawk]

Hi guys
I got the 701sd and i was bored so i thought i might try install windows 98 and see if i could get a game running. i wanted to install to sd so i could keep the origanel OS on the ssd. i have no external cd rom so i just copied all the win98se files from the cd to a USB stick. and made a startup disk on another USB stick. i put them in set it to boot from usb no problems get to dos prompt it detected the sd drive and of course USB stick. i thought i would try fdisk to partion the drive except it only brings up the USB stick that is C: and my sd is on D:. so i just thought its only 4g anyways so i went back to promt and formated D: after this i pulled out the usb startup and swaped to the win98 install usb. typed setup and away it went. i had an error on scan cause the file size had changed on C: cause of the swap fixed that error and it continued. so i let this run by itself cause it takes awhile it got through the whole install process no worries. booted up to windows 98 and seem to run ok. then i shutdown win98 checked that my other OS on the ssd was working no worries also. when i changed the boot menu to make the sd the primary hd. then restarted it just goes to a black screen with _ flashing nothing else. so i tried F8 on startup no luck. i then put my bootdisk back in and pressed F8 and allowed me to startup i selected step by step confirmation. got through all that and into windows98 in safe mode. still no idea what was going on so i thought i might retry it again and select normal startup. and now i cant get anywhere no win98 at all to startup. i viewed the files on the SD card from another OS and it had the normal windows folder program files an documents or somthing but there was no other files in the main part of the drive what so ever. i cant really remember win98 that well but isnt there supposed to be a boot.ini and a few sys files in the main part of your windows drive...

anyhow just wondering if you could help me out and tell me maybe a better way to install this i would really like to keep with using the sd card though as i dont want usb hanging out the side in the way all the time.

should i be setting up the partition differnt or using something else to format it.. i thought maybe it might be a probelem when i remove the usb stick it changes the drive letters but i dont see how that might cause a problem as when i remove the usb stick it would only revert the sd drive to C anyway..

any help would be great thanks



ok i started again from scratch seems when i install 98 it will run once as soon as i restart it will not restart again. it just goes to a black screen with _ flashing
i try F8 and do step by step but it just goes to command prompt. i went to d:windows then typed win and it comes back with no hymem.sys even though when i use dir i can see it is there. i loaded it up onto another computer and replaced the hymem file and it still come back with the same problem..

could it be that my sd card is just to slow... i thought this might be the case it when it was installing and starting for the first time it stayed on a blank screen for an extreamly long time

This post has been edited by tomahawk: 16 April 2009 - 10:16 PM

[dencorso]

I guess your Win 98 ended up installed to drive D:, hence it expects to be on D:. When you restart the machine just with the SD card, it becomes C: and Win 98 finds it's all wrong and doesn't load. If I were you I'd reformat the SD card and make it bootable. Then I'd boot from it, so that it becomes C: and install Win 98 to it from the USB flash drive, as you did before, all over again. This time Win 98 would end up installed to C:, so it should work all right, even without the USB flash drive present. YMMV, though. Good luck! And do keep us posted on yuor results.

[tomahawk]

Yeah you are exactly right i can't believe i didnt think of this i realised after i loaded it to usb what i was doing wrong. anyhow what i have done so far because at this point in time i dont plan to be using 98 to connect to the net i downloaded 98lite and got rid of internet explorer and all the other network stuff. i got 98 down to about i think 60mb or so.. its definatly made it boot quicker off the usb ill keep working on way to get the most speed i can out of it. if anyone wants a copy of 98lite porfessional let me know. its only about 350kb. Now i don't know much about adding registry code or doing much with registry never had to do alot with it. but can you tell me if this is right regarding ACPI. Went to the detect folder in regedit added new dword named it ACPIOption opened it added hexdecimal value of 1 is this correct. because when i did a power off and restart nothing at all happened detect new hardware still found nothing..

[dencorso]

Read posts #44-47 in this selfsame thread.

[iWindoze]

If you have previously run Win2000\XP on your EeePC, could you try copying the entire C:\Windows directory to another partition or flash drive and upon installing Win98SE, point the device manager to X:\Windows\INF and the SYSTEM32\Drivers directory for *DLLs? I've had some luck in the past doing this with hardware that supposedly could not be installed in Win9x, and would like to know whether this trick works for you as well on your Eee.

--iWindoze

UPDATE: I gave this a whirl last night late into the evening. Probably should have waited until I was more awake so I could remember what all I tried and did... Basically I was able to install some things in device manager this way but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. I remember getting the ACPI to install and something having to do with HDA audio, only that was conflicting with something called "motherboard resources" so I don't know.

Also I never even saw the too much memory errors on my gig of RAM, possibly because I'd extracted the Unofficial SP2 for Win98SE into the cabs directory and it did something at install time? I had the mouse and keyboard stop working during hardware detection, but was able to work around this by plugging my spare USB mouse and continue on. I don't know WHY it worked, just that it did.

Here's hoping some of the more savvy people on this board will be able to make some sense of the above and hack our way into better driver support...

This post has been edited by iWindoze: 21 April 2009 - 10:37 AM

[slhk]

Sfor, on Sep 18 2008, 05:12 PM, said:

I've got a correction to the way the Windows 98 treats NDIS2 drivers.

I downloaded the "Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet" DOS driver but failed to install it in Windows according to your steps

Do I need to add anything to CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT myself to load the DOS driver during startup?

[Sfor]

In theory the NDIS driver setup procedure should add a correct AUTOEXEC.BAT entry by itself.

If nothing went wrong, there should be a "C:\WINDOWS\net start" entry in the AUTOEXEC.BAT.

[Sfor]

I've noticed the network file sharing functions are working extremely slow. It is many times faster to transfer files using EEE PC as a client, than server. It is caused by the DOS mode LAN driver, probably. Apparently, network drive sharing requests from a DOS mode driver are processed very slowly.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 12 May 2009 - 03:00 AM

[slhk]

Sfor, on May 9 2009, 06:32 PM, said:

In theory the NDIS driver setup procedure should add a correct AUTOEXEC.BAT entry by itself.

If nothing went wrong, there should be a "C:\WINDOWS\net start" entry in the AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Yes, it added "C:\WINDOWS\net start" to AUTOEXEC.BAT, but networking did not work

[Sfor]

The next thing to check would be:
- Is there a "Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet Adapter" entry present in the Device Manager?
- There should be also one or two PCI Ethernet Controller entries present in the Device manager. They should be marked as switched off, or without a correct driver installed. If they are missing it means network card is disabled in the BIOS settings.
- What is the contents of the protocol.ini file in the WINDOWS directory?

[slhk]

Sfor, on May 13 2009, 04:07 PM, said:

The next thing to check would be:
- Is there a "Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet Adapter" entry present in the Device Manager?
- There should be also one or two PCI Ethernet Controller entries present in the Device manager. They should be marked as switched off, or without a correct driver installed. If they are missing it means network card is disabled in the BIOS settings.
- What is the contents of the protocol.ini file in the WINDOWS directory?

Sorry to advise that I cannot check it at the moment. I have installed Ubuntu to the eeepc as I urgently need it to work properly for my coming trips. I shall play with Win98 again after the trips - maybe around July

Thank you for your help

[iWindoze]

Has anyone tried looking at the Linux drivers and used the Win98SE driver kit that was posted in these forums awhile ago, to see if building better drivers was possible? I'd do it myself, only I am not a coder.

--iWindoze

[Sfor]

iWindoze, on Jun 11 2009, 05:33 PM, said:

Has anyone tried looking at the Linux drivers and used the Win98SE driver kit that was posted in these forums awhile ago, to see if building better drivers was possible? I'd do it myself, only I am not a coder.

--iWindoze

What particular driver kit do you have on your mind?

Also, I've noticed the DOS mode Ethernet driver I've used so far has an importand disadvantage. When the CPU gets hoter, the network speed gets slower. Apparently, the CPU speed goes down, when it gets hoter. Since the DOS mode driver consumes a lot of CPU power, the network speed is affected as well. Funny thing is the problem is visible with the inbound traffic, only. The outbound traffic seems to be working as usual.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 03 July 2009 - 05:04 AM

[dencorso]

Sfor, try to use eeectl and set the fan to 100%, while connected to AC power (or else it'll consume the battery charge quite fast). It may help. As far as I can establish, there are no missing dependencies for eeectl, so it probably run on Win 9x/ME, although it is not documented. Don't forget to set the fan back to native, before going back to battery power, though.

[iWindoze]

Sfor, on Jul 3 2009, 05:58 AM, said:

What particular driver kit do you have on your mind?

The one from MDGx's site: http://www.mdgx.com/add.htm (search for "Driver Development Kit (DDK)" which should take you to his hosted Win9x DDK, which could conceivably be useful to resurrecting Win9x on newer systems for someone who knows how to make good use of it...)

--iWindoze

This post has been edited by iWindoze: 09 July 2009 - 10:47 PM

[Sfor]

dencorso, on Jul 3 2009, 01:33 PM, said:

Sfor, try to use eeectl and set the fan to 100%, while connected to AC power (or else it'll consume the battery charge quite fast). It may help. As far as I can establish, there are no missing dependencies for eeectl, so it probably run on Win 9x/ME, although it is not documented. Don't forget to set the fan back to native, before going back to battery power, though.

It doesn't seem to be working in my case. All I can see is something like an error message with just one word "Arial" in it. But, I did not try the KernelEX, yet.

[dencorso]

Please, Sfor, before resorting to KernelEX, do profile eeectl with Dependency Walker (preferably v. 2.2.600). I cannot do it for you because I don't have an Eee PC handy at the moment and eeectl is hardware-specific. Of course it'll crash during the profiling, but you'll find out what is it it's missing.

[dencorso]

glocK_94, on Aug 27 2008, 09:04 AM, said:

Drivers:
Chipset + GPU : Intel 910 GML -> no win98 drivers !!! That's the main problem Bearwindows VESA drivers / SNAP graphics

Let's keep this thread alive... Sfor's back (welcome back, Sfor! ) so I expect to see things begining to happen here again. So here's some new, afaik, info. Way back when, Petr had found official drivers for the 915GM + ICH-6 chipset:

Petr, on Jan 22 2006, 03:32 PM, said:

915GM + ICH-6 chipset.
This is officially supported in version 6.3.0.1007 of Intel INF Update Utility.

I've just checked, and version 6.3.0.1007 also supports the 910GML!!!
And here's a link for the official Touchpad drivers:Synaptics Drivers

And, please, Sfor, do consider my request in my previous post, about eeectl.