You SHOULD be able to, as long as you can get it to boot through BIOS and not UEFI, and use Legacy IDE instead of AHCI. You'll probably not have a bunch of drivers, though.

Next to impossible, win98 won't install even on late LGA775 systems. Virtualization might work.

/\ Why "won't install"? An LGA775 PC should still be software-compatible enough with older PCs for WIndows9x to at least start in safe mode, no? Of course you need to have less than 512 MB RAM so its memory management won't start tripping onto itself. I never tried it, though, but I can't imagine a reason for it not starting at all as long as you can get its DOS to boot on the machine.

I don't know why... but it simply don't work, tried it many times on different 775 chipsets with IDE HDD and 512MB DDR2. At some point of the install process, the installer will just hang or crash. Same thing happens when you just connect HDD with win98 already installed using older PC - on LGA775 it starts booting and then crash.

Last config I tried not so long ago was:
Pentium D 945
Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro (i975X)
512MB DDR2
Voodoo5 PCI
40GB Seagate IDE HDD

I forgot to the 1GB ram problem... tablets and netbook all have from 1 to 2GB and I can't install ME directly... Virtualizing wasnt bad last time I tried but performance even with optimizations are mixed... seems fast but you can feel it's not as fast as it should be. Maybe the E350 wasnt the best system to try.

Perhaps it refuses to boot because of the 975 chipset? I've had Pentium M laptops with the 945 (the same one that you would find on LGA775 boards, except mobile variants thereof) chipset run perfectly under 9x, but I don't think I ever got a working video driver for the integrated 945GM graphics...

You can get at least decent 2D Graphics:

http://www.navozhdeniye.narod.ru/vbe9x.htm

The main IDEA of the project was taken from standard XP/2003 VGA.SYS display driver with generic VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) 1.02 […]
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The main IDEA of the project was taken from standard XP/2003 VGA.SYS display driver with generic VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) 1.02/2.00/3.00+ support.
VBEMP.DRV is a standard Windows 9x™ Video Display Driver.
It supports ALL of MS Windows 9x™ Family (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me)

Supports VBE 2.00+ compliant PCI/AGP/PCI-E video cards with linear frame buffer.

Windows 98/ME's ACPI support needs to be disabled in order to reliably install it on 965/975 chipset machines. The ACPI hardware detection routine is notoriously buggy and it only gets worse on newer machines with later revisions of ACPI and things like PCIe.

Update: bought a cheap Win10 7" Atom Z3735G tablet (500-1333Mhz 4 core). Running 3dmark2000 is really smooth but if I get to boot something from usb (man am I old... the uefi bios has an absurd amount of never heard settings...) I will try some linux (as I expect not so easy to) and older os.

havli wrote:

Next to impossible, win98 won't install even on late LGA775 systems. Virtualization might work.

I know that intel 865G is the last intel chipset that support win98

works on 915GM.

Well it seems that usual linux distro doesnt support these hardware completely so I will wait for it. To try Win9x I need to see if I can not overwrite the original os.
By the way it is good to see 3dmark2005 running smoother than the last time I ran it on a desktop years ago.. 😁 Quiet impressive I've to say.