I have an old computer that has died. It was running Windows 98 SE. The old computer had some software that I would like to be able to continue to use.

I have a backup of the old computer made with Norton Ghost.

I have a spare computer running Windows XP Pro.

Is it possible to put the backup of Windows 98 SE and software that was on the old computer on the spare computer running Windows XP Pro?

In other words, I would like to replace the Windows XP Pro OS with Windows 98 SE.

Would installing Windows 98 SE on the spare computer and then down loading the backup be the best choice?

Thanks for the advice.

I strongly urge you to edit your post and remove your Email address. It's an open invitation to spamming etc.

If you have (or can obtain) a 98SE CD, you can load your Ghosted backup, then using regedit, delete the HKLM_System_CurrentControlSet_ENUM key. When you restart, 98 will scan the system and load appropriate data/drivers to run the machine.

Thanks for the advice, especially the email address. The golden years can be challenging.
I have a Windows 98 SE CD.
Are you saying to put the 98SE backup on the computer running XP Pro and then edit the registry?

The problem with putting a copy of Windows created on another computer & replacing the OS on another with the copy & using a CD is that you have to use the OS you're replacing to do so. The best thing to do if you have the installation CD is to first erase the partition with XP on it with the XP disk and then use the 98 installation disk CD to install it. Thats the safest way to do so so that you don't have driver or registry conflicts but Dan Penny is telling you that after copying 98 from one computer to another you can remove that registry key (using regedit) and 98 will reconfigure itself for your other computer. I'm sure Dan will correct me if I'm wrong. That is something I didn't know that you could do.

However what you can't do is to just have 98copy itself onto a cd. It won't be able to copy all of itself because part of it is in use. You have to have specialize software that you boot into from a disk & copy it to a hard drive (which is what he means by a ghosted backup) and then use the same software to copy it to the hard drive in computer 2. The easiest thing to do would be to first use the XP cd to delete the XP partition on computer 2, put the hard drive from computer 1 (where computer 1 is the one that currently has 98 on it), copy 98 from one drive to another, boot into 98 on computer 2, & then delete the registry key; does that make sense? Again you have to have specialized software to do this & the only ones I know of are $$$.

Since you have the 98 installation disk I just recommend that you just install it on the second computer. That way you have a fresh copy of 98 on the computer. However I think that you will have to use the XP cd to erase XP but I could be wrong. Well if you go with the specialized software it might have the ability built in to erase XP.

Dan, how would he delete the registry entry? Is it likely that 98 SE will boot after being restored to completely different hardware? Perhaps booting to Safe Mode the first time would help?

Curious as this sounds like a neat way to do this if it will work.

I have a new hard drive to put into the computer that is running XP Pro which I will be installing Windows 98 SE.

I formatted the new drive using a computer running XP Pro, which I believe formatted the drive for a NTSF file system.

Do I need to format the new drive for FAT 32 file system or can I leave the disk formatted for a NTSF file system?

Thanks for the help.

Ztraker,

The ENUM key holds the hardware information. By deleting this key, upon a restart, Windows 98(SE) will see no information and automatically run the hardware part of setup to gather and "log" the new hardware info. This is better than having "orphaned" entries clogging things up in the registry.
(I may have the registry "path" wrong, it's been a while. But it's under HKLM.)

Side note: I would format the receiving partition as FAT32. If I remember correctly, 98 won't "see" an NTFS partition.

Thanks Dan.

How difficult would it be to have one computer with two hard drives having one for 98SE and the other for XP Pro?

What are the steps in setting up two operating systems on one computer?

Prior to the crash, I had two computers and one monitor, keyboard and mouse. I could switch between the computers with a KVM switch. They were on the same network so I could transfer files between the two computers.

Do a Google search for dual boot xp 98, lots of instructions available. All say that 98 must be installed first and on the first (master) drive. Then you can install XP on the second and it will automatically setup a dual boot with 98.

Yes both of them are correct. Xp will recognize 98 but not the other way around which is Xp needs to be installed last. When doing a dual boot windows system the newer OS is always installed last.

Also when 98 was realized NTFS didn't yet exist so 98 can't use it.