Which way to install Windows 98 in a VM
So, the way I see it, there are 2 ways of installing Windows 98.
1. Booting off the OEM image, and installing from that. I think this will format my hard drive.
2. Installing MS-DOS, and then attaching the retail image and running the setup program. I wonder if this will let me keep the full MS-DOS environment.
I am wondering which method I should use. My best-case scenario would be a working Windows 98 and a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 environment. The thing about the "Reboot into MS-DOS" option in Windows is that it is not a fully-featured DOS environment. There is no help or other utilities, which I want. I would rather not get into dual-booting, but it could be an option.
Comments
You probably don't want to have Windows 98 and MS-DOS on the same partition. DOS's largest partition is 2 GB using 32kB sectors which is wasteful and a bit small for Win98. Have you considered making multiple VMs, one for DOS and a different one for Win98?
Note that Win98 includes many of the command line utilities from DOS which can be optionally installed and with some third party software it is necessary to use a FAT32 supporting update.
On real hardware or if the VM software supports it, one could setup two drives and swap between them in the BIOS to boot the correct OS.
If installing Win98 to a FAT32 partition, consider making a modest sized FAT16 partition to go with it. Early DOS software (i.e. supporting DOS 1's FCB interface) won't work on FAT32 drives under Win98. A 100 MB FAT16 partition would take many years for Wordstar 3.3 to fill but is an insignificant portion of a modern hard drive.
Thanks. I am now wondering what happens to the old MS-DOS installation when installing Windows 98 retail. Does it just get deleted?
Ok. I tried it myself, and it does get deleted when the drive is formatted.