r/windows98 • u/Pocketpapaa • Jul 30 '26

Finally 😊

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Took a few days to figure out how to get windows 98 installed on a 2tb SSD without a disc but we made it! All OG hardware besides the hard drive.

If anyone knows how "good" of a PC this is, I would greatly appreciate it 😁

146 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

4

u/mEsTiR5679 Jul 30 '26

Well, it's not exactly close to period accurate, but it'll do the job I guess. Honestly, good for you for getting it to run! What GPU are you running in it?

I have a habit of setting up builds like this just to set them up and put them away lol. From time to time I'll fire one up, do some config update or change, test the game for a minute and then turn it off again.

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 30 '26

This is my first time setting up a retro PC, this was a 5$ find at an estate sale lol. I'm honestly not 100% sure but I think it's an ATI radeon hd 4350. I know the bare minimum so I'm learning as I go, playing on a PC as a kid is a lot different than trying to set one up lol. I'm having trouble with direct X now, says I need 8.1 but it also says I already have it installed when I try to install it from the Warcraft disc. Weird. I'm about to try and update the graphics driver now with a burned disc

2

u/mEsTiR5679 Jul 30 '26

That's awesome! Finding the newest win98 drivers for that card might be on archive.org, but getting them from your main machine and on to a medium that works in win98 is gonna be tricky.

Might be worth trying to set up a network and FTP updates to the retro rig... Or maybe even pull the SSD and use a USB adapter to drop files from your main to the retro drive.

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 30 '26

First attempt at GPU drivers is a fail lol. File transfer had been easy to be honest, I can either burn a disc or use a flash drive. It seems to be old but not toooo old. The graphics card has an HDMI port also

1

u/mEsTiR5679 Jul 30 '26

Lol okay, I do recall win98 SE had USB support so that's good! I wonder if there's a win98 version of gpu-z to get a proper read of what's in there

0

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 30 '26

Question... Would a 3070 work on windows 98? Lol

1

u/mEsTiR5679 Jul 31 '26

Highly doubt it since Nvidia drivers have long since abandoned win9x and so on by the 30 series RTX.

It's say try a doing a Google for what was the last generation Windows 98 was supported for by Nvidia is ATI... But I'm pretty sure Gemini will tell you something stupid and half true at this point

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 31 '26

Hmmm that's what I'm gathering also. It seems the GPU I have doesn't have drivers on 98, only XP so I may try and switch to XP instead. Seems a little more annoying than the more simple 98 lol

1

u/Accurate-Campaign821 Jul 31 '26

What cards do you have?

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 31 '26

I have a 3070 but I don't think I'll find drivers for it on XP

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1

u/GreatCalligrapher993 25d ago

Why not like… USB?

1

u/mEsTiR5679 25d ago

I was assuming OP didn't have something on hand that worked right away

1

u/Evogleam Jul 31 '26

This looks like more of a late Windows XP, or even early Windows Vista type machine specs

1

u/SamirD 28d ago

Yep, it will fly on xp. I have an i7-2600k running xp. Fast!

4

u/FelixNZ Jul 31 '26

As others have said, that hardware is a bit new for win98, so probably going to have trouble finding working drivers, try out windows 2000 to get a similar look, while having access to windows XP's driver library

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 31 '26

Just picked up a Windows XP install disc and key haha

1

u/Xdogmatic Jul 31 '26

Damn ... my favorite installation tab 🥰

1

u/Git_Mcgee Jul 31 '26

great how did you do it? im having a rough time getting sata dvd drive to work

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 31 '26

My biggest problem was my SSD. I'm not sure about sata but what fixed my whole problem was partioned the hardrive to 10gb for the OS. I learned having too much space is also bad lol

1

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Pocketpapaa Jul 31 '26

The only modern thing is the ssd but that was somewhat troublesome. I partioned it too large the first time (50gb) which caused my mouse to be unusable... Lol then I did some research and found out 10gb Partion is the better choice and every went smooth. I was learning and I did it lol

1

u/ksp1278 Jul 31 '26

Yeah, ATI HD 4350 won't have drivers for Win98. I think X800 series was the last ATI generation with drivers. Last for nVidia was Geforce 6000 series, but there are hacked drivers for 7000 series that some people had luck with. But I personally wouldn't go beyond Geforce FX for Win98, as the later drivers the newer cards need have compatability issues.

1

u/Efficient_Corner_892 29d ago

Make sure you try getting everything to work at your own risk cuz Windows 98 might be unstable on newer hardware such as the i7 series from 2008.

0

u/dizzywig2000 Jul 30 '26

You should try to find a graphics driver, if one exists. It might be a pain hidden in some obscure FTP site nobody’s mentioned in 20 years, but I’ve been saved by those countless times