Another Lost Soul’s Blog

Virtualising a Windows 98 PC using VMWare Workstation 6.5 February 10, 2009

My fathers 10 year old Windows 98 PC gave up the ghost a couple of weeks back. On inspection, it looked like a dead power supply. Instead of searching ebay for a second hand power supply, I took up the challenge of Virtualising the PC. Not an easy challenge as Windows 98 is not supported by VMWare converter.

To do this, I bought a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 hard disk adapter from ebay for £15. This allowed me to mount the hard disk on my laptop to check whether the data was there. As Windows 98 uses fat32 there would be no issue reading the disk. This was successful and the challenge was on.

To carry out the task I used the following:

*VMWare Workstation 6.5
*Winimage – http://www.winimage.com

To start I mounted the hard disk on my laptop and used Winimage to create an image of the aging 4GB HDD.
This produced a VHD file which also meant the MBR would be intact so it could be booted easily.

I then created 2 VMs. One configured with XP which could be used to write the VHD image back to a 4GB vmdk and one configured for Windows 98 with a 4GB IDE vmdk which would ultimately be the virtualised machine.

The trick here is to first create the 4GB vmdk as an IDE disk by selecting Windows 98 as the VM OS first.
Don’t power the 98 VM on. With the XP VM powered off (this needs to be a fully functioning copy of XP with winimage installed and access to the VHD backup file). Add the blank 4GB vmdk disk file which was created for the 98 VM. Power up the XP VM. When it boots it will not show up as a drive letter – dont worry. Run winimage and restore the VHD file choosing the 4GB IDE disk. Once complete power down the XP VM.

Power up the 98 VM and voila you should see the 98 boot screen. Once it boots it will start to go through the process of detecting devices. You may see a PCI-to-PCI bridge device being detected over and over again. This will happen about 30 times and it is important to install the driver and not click cancel each time.
After a series of reboots and possibly unknown devices you should have an intact Windows 98 virtualised PC.

To install VMTools under Windows 98 I was presented with the ISO being mounted as an audio CD. The workaround for this is to power down the VM, add another CD drive which uses the Winpre2k.iso in Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation. On boot you should now be able to run the VMTools manually. This will put on the SVGA and network driver and allow drag and drop between the host and the VM.

It is important to note this exercise was purely used for data recovery purposes. If you are still wanting to use Windows 98 – WHY?!