I have an old (vintage 1999), retired e-Machines computer with Windows 98 installed, and no longer have the space to keep it around. I know that I can extract the 8-meg hard drive and install it as a second drive in one of my newer machines (both of which run XP).

Would I be able to boot from this disk and run Win 98 occasionally? It would be helpful in checking the backward-compatibility of my projects.

As a first attempt, I put the old drive into one of those chasses that converts it to a USB drive. I plugged this into my newer Compaq computer, and sure enough, when the boot menu was invoked, I was able to select this USB drive as the boot device and see the Win 98 startup screen.

Soon afterward, it reported an error with the C: drive and died.

I had somehow expected that the external Win 98 drive would have become "C:" and been internally consistent, but this may not be the case. Probably, it's still "J:" or "Q:" or whatever, and its WIN.INI file has numerous references to "C:\..."

Is there anyway to make this scheme work? I suspect that I may have to disable the internal C: drive and/or reinstall 98 to this drive (if indeed my e-Machines recovery disk will do that on a Compaq host). I know that I could make a partition and install Win 98 there, but I have only the recovery disk, not a full installation.

Given that my pseudo-98 machine would have all kind of driver problems and may not be able to access the other drives, it may not be worth the effort. I may just back up the whole drive on one (1) DVD for the data, then wipe it. Any ideas?


Edit: Upon searching and reading a few threads, it looks as if this won't work without some extensive reinstallation, so I'll probably consider keeping the old computer around. I'd still welcome any comments.