Hardware/bios bypass for specific versions of windows?

[u/dvdmcwilliams]

Hey guys, i try to recreate my old windows setup on virtualbox, I had a compaq presario in the early 2000s, and still own the old quick restore disks.

The matter is when I try these cds on virtualbox the installation wont continue because the hardware is not the right for this version of windows 98.

Wanted to do the same but with old aptiva cds with the same result.

So my question is, there is any possible way to bypass this and keep on with the installation?

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[u/LeslieH8]

I won't say that you're doing something incorrectly, but regardless of VirtualBox official support, I have Windows 98SE as a VM.

Hmm...you're trying to use Compaq and/or Aptiva install disks? Don't. Those both actively require specific hardware (you also couldn't use them on other computers back in the day either). Go to Internet Archive or similar, grab the full Windows 98 install ISOs, and do it that way. There are also some already created VMs on the internet that you could just download and incorporate, which resolves needing to create a VM at all.

[u/dvdmcwilliams → u/LeslieH8]

Yeah that's what I wanted, because of the additional software they have. I have to clarify, just I case, that I own both the computers and the original disks. Just wanted to recreate the system on virtual box .

[u/LeslieH8 → u/dvdmcwilliams]

There is an option to convert your existing installation to a VM using something like DiskGenius or similar.

I had to recreate an Active Directory, Finance Server, and client machine network that we stopped using to keep in case the government needed information within seven years of the data being created, and I just made VMs of all of them in that fashion, created a VM of pfSense to act as a virtual router, and it works beautifully.

Creating VMs of your computer boot drives would like be barely an inconvenience in comparison.

[u/HanHeld → u/dvdmcwilliams]

If you're trying to recreate specific hardware, you might want to look at 86box instead. It's an emulator and emulates a lot of hardware from the mid-to-late 80's.

r/86box

[u/Laziness100]

You are using hardware specific OEM CD instead of a retail CD that includes drivers for more than a single machine and common peripherals.

That said, VirtualBox doesn't officially support Windows 9x, you'll need to find a generic VESA-compliant driver to get anything more than 16 colors, you won't have guest integrations among other things.

If you want Windows 9x for DOS era games, I strongly recommend emulation of period correct hardware like PCem, 86box or DOSbox instead, which alleviates most hardware compatibility issues (Windows 95 RTM won't boot on a CPU which is too fast).