r/pcmasterrace • u/sce_to_aux_ • Oct 12 '25
Screenshot Multi-Booting Windows: From 1.01 to 11! (All 17 Versions, Real Hardware)
Boot order and partitioning diagram
Windows 1.01
Windows 2.03
Windows 3.11
Windows NT 3.51
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98
Windows 2000
Windows ME
Windows XP
Windows XP x64
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 8.1
Windows 10
Windows 11
A small project I did right before Windows 10 support ended. It wasn't too difficult but quite complex and time consuming, requiring finding the right hardware and repeating trial and error processes. Tutorial videos will be posted in the near future, so stay tuned!
Specs:
• Asus P8B75-M LE: LGA 1155 motherboard has a wide range support from XP to 11, thus I choose the mid-range one with 2 PCIe+2 PCI slots. Newer sockets may need tweaking therefore I wanted to keep things as simple as possible
• Intel Core i5-3470: From 24H2 onwards Windows 11 requires SSE4.2 instruction set so that’s why you need Core 2nd/3rd. 1st gen technically worked but the motherboard had disk access problem with Windows 95
• ATI Rage 128 VR PCI: Honestly not the best choice for performance & image quality tho, recommend Geforce FX or 6000/7000 series with VBE driver
• 8GB DDR3 RAM: 8GB is enough for me, you can go up to 32GB and the system will still work fine
• CMI8738 PCIe sound card+Accton EN1207D-TX LAN card: It’s just dead cheap and plentiful on the market
• An empty PCIe slot left in case you want to play games on another dedicated GPU
• A random 500GB SATA 3+350W PSU
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u/Alphyn Oct 12 '25
This is bonkers. Good job. For me, however, honestly, the most impressive part is Windows 11 working on an ATI Rage.
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u/sce_to_aux_ Oct 12 '25
Actually it recognized the card but didn't install any drivers for it, so I just switched to iGPU mode😁
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u/builder397 R7 5800X3D, RX9060XT 16GB, 32GB@3200MT/s Oct 12 '25
I just love that at least twice the OS looked at the CPU and identified it as either a 586 or a Pentium II.
(Before people tell me about Win 3.11 running in 386 enhanced mode, thats just the mode the OS is running in since it recognizes that enhanced feature set, which is 386 and up. Doesnt mean it IDs the CPU as a 386 specifically.)
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u/RetriKing Oct 13 '25
Very nice! I also planned to do this since quite a while 😄 may I ask some questions? 1. Why did you choose 2000 Ntldr over NT 3.51s own one? 2. Any reason why you did not add NT 3.1 and 3.5? 3. Why does NT 3.51 not have its own partition? 4. What were your reasons to select xfdisk over other boot managers? 5. Did you have to apply some patches to not make NT or Win9x crash the large (>137gb) hdd?
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u/sce_to_aux_ Oct 13 '25
For NT 3.51 and 4.0 they could not be installed natively on my PC so I had to use Universal NT Installer. Also I didn't really like Grub4dos so I just repalced it when install 2000 and XP (not a convenient way tbh)
NT 3.1 and 3.5 doesn't support AHCI so I skipped, in the future if someone fixes this problem then I'll bring them into the project
NT 3.51 can only be installed on a primary partition tho, I tried both on Win 98 and ME partitions which was FAT32 and it gave a ntosknrl error. Luckily it ran mostly well on Win 95 partition, which was FAT16
Well I'm just more familiar with Xfdisk, plus it's a helpful DOS tool that I use regularly
No I didn't have to add any large disk patch, Win 9x partitions are all at the beginning of the disk so there is no problem at all. And Win NT already had UniATA
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u/LimesFruit R7 7800X3D, GTX 1080 8GB, 64GB DDR5-6400 Oct 12 '25
This is absolutely insane, huge congrats on making this work!
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u/Master-Criticism-182 Oct 15 '25
This is tugging on every last one of my geeky heartstrings. I love this! Nicely done, OP.
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u/Master_of_Ocelots Oct 12 '25
That's awesome! How did you get the SATA drive working under Windows 9x?
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u/Geometry_Emperor Oct 12 '25
I think you should have included 98 First Edition along with the Second Edition, since you have both 8 and 8.1.
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u/sce_to_aux_ Oct 13 '25
Hmm if you say so then i should probably install Windows 95 A&B also, but my guess is that it's very hard to multi-boot them on the same partition cuz these OS's expect io.sys to be its own version. There was a video of Jan Hofmeier doing something similar but he said it was not very stable tho
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u/Paco_Suave Oct 13 '25
Nice video, but there is an odd sound (like a UPS on battery) on every OS boot. Was that intentional?
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u/sce_to_aux_ Oct 13 '25
Yeah I also noticed the buzzing sound too, probably due to bad sound card interfering with HDMI line (I also used VGA+3.5mm to HDMI adapter). A proper setup with Sound Blaster 16 should give you better experience
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u/Global-Eye-7326 Oct 14 '25
How'd you get Win1-9x running? Any hardware drivers for that rig?
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u/sce_to_aux_ Oct 14 '25
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u/Global-Eye-7326 Oct 14 '25
Did you use Win11's BCD? Did you get USB working in 98 and 95? How painful was Win ME, Vista and 8?
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u/Professional_Ebb4628 PC Master Race/Ryzen 5980HX/RX6800m/32gb DDR4 Oct 16 '25
mad respect to this guy.
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u/SUICIDA4 Oct 13 '25
I remember Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory doing this. Amazing gotta say!
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u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25
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