So I had some progress. I ended up doing the following to get Win 98 SE installed:
- Put the CF card in a different machine and booted to a MS DOS 6.22 floppy,
- Created a Primary DOS partition on the CF card using Fdisk (it's a 4GB card so the max partition under DOS 6.22 was 2GB),
- Rebooted and formatted the CF card partition with format /s option to make it bootable (formatted as FAT),
- Then rebooted starting from the WIN98 SE CD and copied the WIN98 folder to the CF card (as well as drivers and some games),
- Next moved the CF card to the VIA MB CF to IDE adapter and booted from the CF card under DOS 6.22,
- Started the WIN98 setup.exe from the WIN98 directory. It was a bit unstable so I loaded Fail-Safe Defaults from BIOS and made it through setup after a few tries.
- Once WIN98 was installed I was able to load optimized defaults.
- I also converted the FAT partition to FAT32 using the WIN 98 system tool.
Note: The only setting that needs to be changed in BIOS in order to access / boot from the CF card is under Integrated Peripherals > VIA OnChip IDE Device > IDE DMA Transfer Access > Disabled. Needed to change this when I loaded both Fail Safe and Optimized defaults.
I was able to get the S3 Video, Realtek AC'97 audio, VIA chipset drivers all working. Actually performs pretty well under Win 98 ... able to play Duke Nukem 3D just fine. Need to try some other titles like Doom, Quake, etc. to see what it can handle. Not expecting to do any of the later 90's / early 2000's titles but seems like it might be a good setup for early to mid-90's games. It has a PCI slot so I could add a Soundblaster or PCI Video card but I may just keep it as compact as possible for now.
