I have recently partioned my drive to install multiple operating systems to test something, so I'm not bothered if something fails. I am trying to install Windows 98 but it keeps complaining that it wants to format my C drive, the one I am using right now, though I want to install it on to a dtive H, one of the partitions.
How can I tell Windows 98 that I want to install it onto a drive other than C?
I realise you've now done it with Virtual PC, but the way to do this would be to create a second primary partition (not officially supported by Microsoft, but it does work) using a partitioning tool like PartitionMagic (you can't do it from Windows) and then changing it to be active. This changes that partition to C: drive and will then allow you to install Windows 98. To change back, you'd run FDISK from within Windows 98 and set your XP partition back to active.
Just been trying Windows 98 on Virtual PC and it's working fantastic. Thanks, guys. However, I've got hold of Windows 95 (or Windows 95b to be exact) and it doesn't want to load at startup for some reason (using the whole boot to cd procedure).
Why is this?
Do you mean the CD won't boot? This is because it can't. Windows 95 CDs were not bootable (neither were most Windows 98 CDs either). They came with a floppy disk which you used to boot the system and then run the setup program on the CD.
Windows 95 fell over completely when processor clock speeds started exceeding 350Mhz in mid 1998 and wouldn't boot. A patch was available, but only for AMDs.
IIRC, it was only AMD K6-2 and K6-III CPUs which were affected at the time, by the time it had problems with other CPUs it had become obsolete and so there were no more patches. I remember that patch well, had to use it myself. I loved the way that a patch you need to make Windows boot was packaged inside a Windows-based installer! You either had to continually reset your system until it would boot up succesfully (sometimes 30-40 attempts were needed!) or use another machine to extract the files!. Classic Microsoft that.
Is it actually possible for PCs to be too fast for some operating systems? For example, if I were to install Windows 3.1 on my P4 with 2GB of RAM (letting go of the fact that it's NTFS disk...!) would it work? Or would it effectively trip up over itself?
Windows 3.1/95/98/ME would have definite issues because they all directly access the hardware to greater or lesser degrees (in particular, these versions of Windows cannot deal with more than 512MB of RAM). However, really old versions of Windows which had real-mode support (so Windows 3.0 backwards) will run happily on new hardware.
It is actually possible to install Windows 3.0 from within a Windows XP command prompt, on an NTFS disk and all, and actually have it running *inside* XP in a Window if you use real mode (so you'd start it with win /r).
Going the other way, what's the oldest machine anyone's managed to get XP working on?
The only checks the installer makes are for memory and disk space. As long as you have 64MB of memory installed, it will install (especially since the installation programme dates back to MS-DOS 5.0 from 1991!). Whether it will run after that installation is anyone's guess. I've never tried XP on anything less than a Pentium 200.
I did once experiment with running Windows 95 below it's minimum specification - a 386 SX/16 with 4MB of RAM (it was supposed to require a 386DX). Although booting took an age (about 10 minutes!) it was actually perfectly useable once it had started up.
