derSammler wrote:You could simply do that using a DOS menu. Install Windows 98 as normal, then duplicate the Windows folder, so you have e.g. WIN […]
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You could simply do that using a DOS menu. Install Windows 98 as normal, then duplicate the Windows folder, so you have e.g. WINDOWS and WINDOWS.BAK (do this within Windows). Set BootGUI=0 in msdos.sys. Now create a DOS menu with two entries: "Boot current Windows" and "Switch Windows installation". The first just runs win.com, so the actual WINDOWS folder is used, the other one does:
move WINDOWS WINDOWS.OLD
move WINDOWS.BAK WINDOWS
move WINDOWS.OLD WINDOWS.BAK
WIN.COM
Which will switch to the other installation and make that one the currect and then boots it.
I can confirm, this method works. 😀
I know I typed a post about this earlier, but apparently I forgot to actually post it? Anyway, here is the process I went through:
On my tester system (Wintac W6BXA 440BX, P3 450, 20GB Maxtor D740X, 256MB PC-100, S3 Trio64V2/DX) I backed up a few things from the hard drive to a flash drive, rebooted from a 98SE boot floppy, formatted the 20GB drive to ensure a 100% fresh start, used an alternative Windows install I have on a CF card to copy the win98 folder to the 20GB drive (could have done it from a cdrom too), shut down, disconnected all drives except my 20GB drive and my floppy, booted from the floppy, ran setup from the c:\win98 folder (setup /is to skip scandisk check which often has problems with larger drives).
After Windows was installed, I installed the USB storage driver and installed a few games and scads of demos from 1997-1999 PC Gamer disks I had laying around. The idea was to make a mostly hardware-agnostic but packed-to-the-gills Windows 98SE video\sound card testing installation. Once I got it loaded with games, I edited msdos.sys to boot straight to the command prompt (under options enter: bootgui=0 and logo=0). Now it was time to make copies of the Windows folder. Using DOS would not for this work due to the long file names, lots of hidden, read only and system files, many sub-directories etc. I could have done it by booting from my CF card on the tester system but I thought it'd been nice to also be able to copy large amounts of drivers and other things from my main system. So, I disconnected the drive, attached it to my main PC with a USB>IDE adapter and proceeded to make several copies of the WINDOWS folder (making sure that hidden and system files were shown). I named the copies as follows:
WIN_BACK (the original untouched Windows directory)
WIN_ORIG (the first copy of the original, ready to be used with my S3 Trio for testing things that don't need drivers, like disk drives)
WIN_V1 (for testing Voodoo Graphics cards)
WIN_V2 (for Voodoo 2)
WIN_V3 (for Voodoo 3)
WIN_NV (for Nvidia cards... though I may have more than one of these eventually)
... and I can easily make more by simply copying the WIN_BACK folder from within Windows (on the tester) and renaming it (WIN_ATI for example)
For the first boot I renamed WIN_ORIG to Windows. This would have also been a good time add the path command to the autoexec (I ended up having to mess with this under DOS the first time). In autoexec.bat I entered: path=C:\windows;C:\windows\command;C:\WIN_BACK\command
Without "c:\WIN_BACK\command" included, it would no longer be possible to MOVE (rename) a directory to Windows once the existing Windows folder was renamed (crazy software paradox thing) because the MOVE command would no longer be recognized (it exists in the WINDOWS\COMMAND directory).
First boot I typed: "MOVE WINDOWS WIN_ORIG" and it was done in seconds. Then I typed "MOVE WIN_V3 WINDOWS" and it was done in seconds. I typed "WIN" and Windows was loading and I was on my way! 😀
It actually works! It works perfectly in fact. Its super fast to MOVE the folder from one "name" to another, and I find it simple enough to just do it manually for now without messing with batch files. Less room for error doing this as well. I will probably put identifiers into each windows directory (blank file called "ZWIN_V3" for example, so it'd appear at the end of a dir listing) just in case I get sidetracked for a while and forget which folder is currently named Windows.
My biggest blunder that cost me many many hours of work ended up being a really stupid video driver\setting issue. It could have been that I should have set my desktop to a lower resolution\bit depth (on the Trio64) before shutting down and installing my Voodoo 3 card. When loading up the WIN_V3 installation the first time, I couldn't get ANY games to work after installing drivers with 3 different Voodoo 3 cards. I installed drivers 5 times at least, deleted all traces of drivers manually from the registry and from Windows directories, reinstalled some games, installed DirectX 7.0a (rather than 6.1a)... nothing worked. Games would just crash when trying to switch from 2D to 3D modes, or would freeze or give me a blank screen. Some times I had strange issues that seemed related to my monitor not exposing the correct resolutions so I switched MONITORS and it made no difference. I thought maybe my motherboard was dying, or my power supply... I tried a different 440BX board I had, with no change. I deleted that entire Windows directory and started fresh with a new copy that was all set up and ready to go (which felt really awesome btw) and it STILL did it after installing drivers. After messing around a bit I changed the desktop resolution to 1024x768 24bit (from the standard 800x600 16bit) and... everything worked great after that. 🤣 I don't know what the deal was with this, but I'm going to write this one down to hopefully save myself some time in the future. I'm thinking that maybe some leftover from the S3 Trio or some awful quirk of 98SE was interfering until I changed the desktop resolution and bit depth HIGHER than any of the games were trying to run. I had tried 640x480 16bit already and it made no difference so I assumed this wasn't the problem. Oh well... 😵
I'm tempted to actually purposefully try this again to see if I can repeat this failure and the fix... but after all the hours I spent diagnosing it, I'm sick of looking at the same games crashing. 😵
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
