Just a short howto for installing Windows 98 SE (R) in VMware Server (1.0.3) for Linux. Although I’m not a big fan of M$, sometimes I have to use it. I.e. my bank does not have any linux software for online banking… whatever.. I had an old Win98SE license at home and that crap of software is quite fast as a virtual machine and as long I don’t have to use too often, stability is not the essential part for me..

Prerequisite: You already have installed VMware Server

Create a new virtual machine and choose Win9x as guest system. As the Win9x cdrom is not bootable, boot with a dos disk and create a partion using fdisk (If you lost your dos disk or you don’t have a floppy drive, you can get an image i.e. at http://www.bootdisk.com).

After rebooting your computer, format drive c: using
format c: /s

Reboot your computer again and ensure that atapi/scsi drivers are loaded so that you can access your cdrom-drive (or image).
Start installation with
Z:\setup.exe /iv

The rest is quite easy – follow the installtion steps in the setup program and install the VMware Tools when your system is up and running.

If you want to enable sound, add a sound device for the virtual machine and install the Sound Blaster PCI 128 (R) driver from the creative labs archive.