Hello everybody,

my first post here. I just want to share my experience with said laptop, and maybe some of you may have some advice.
So, I was given this laptop about 8/10 years ago or so by a lady who bought a new pc, and I just put it aside.
A couple of days ago I wanted to see if everything worked fine, and because it is the oldest piece of hardware around my house, I fancied the idea to check if it was possible to install MS/DOS and/or real Windows 98 on it.
I already replaced the old hard disk with a 64Gb mSATA SSD via an IDE adapter, which works just fine. The SSD unit contains two partitions. The second partition is NTFS cntains Windows XP (but I didn't try booting into it, see further). The first partition is the one where I intended to work on.
Bios offers 4 possible booting ways: HDD, ODD, USB FDC, LAN.
ODD won't work. It lights up, it opens, but won't read anythind. I don't even know if it spins.
USB FDC won't work either. I tried both with an external 3,5" usb drive and a number of working usb dongles, it just doesn't work. USB ports work fine under Windows.
LAN I don't even know how it works.

So I was stuck with HDD. After so many trials and errors (mainly involving swapping ssd from the laptop to another pc), I was able to make it boot properly from the SSD.
I had to connect the SSD to another pc via a msata to sata adapter to prepare it. Booting on the second PC from a Win98 setup floppy .img file transferred with WinImage on a usb dongle, I used the sys c: command to make the first partition bootable, then I copied the whole content of a windows 98se CD ISO file into a directory on the SSD, to install it from there. I then found out that 2 Gb RAM are too much for Windows 98 to install. So I took out 1 Gb and went on.
After installation, I used mempatch to keep 2Gb RAM installed without errors or BSoD's. Said patch had to be run from DOS prompt in safe mode.

Now I had to look for drivers. The most important are chipset, VGA, sound, and a universal usb driver.
- Chipset is Intel 915p. I don't even know if it was actually necessary, but the driver for windows 98se was easy to find.
- Sound card is a Realtek AC'97. The driver is still available on their website, but it simply doesn't work. I then found out that you want to look for the Windows 95 version. Don't ask me why. A manually installation is needed, otherwise it looks for Windows 95 and won't install. But it works.
- Universal USB driver is easy to find. For some reason I ended up downloading an Italian version (my setup is in Italian) which does its job.
- VGA is both the weak spot and a pain in the neck. Apparently, a pci-e ATI x600 graphic card is too new for Windows98SE. Catalyst 6.2 is supposed to work under Win98SE, but it won't find the correct HW and stops the installation.
I found some instruction here and on other forums, so I had to manually add some lines to the C5xxxxx.inf file in order to make the OS recognize the card and the correct display resolution, after a couple of reboots.
FYI, this laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon x600, which is an RV380 and its ID is VEN_1002, DEV_3150 (I had to look for some tool that reads HW ID's to find out, because Windows 98 doesn't display them in the control panel)
So, I dont' know if the x600 will be totally compatible, but at least I have 32bit colors (16,8 millions of them) and the correct display resolution of 1440x900.
- Ethernet Broadcom Gigabit card driver was easy to find, but I haven't connected the laptop to my LAN or the internet.
Other devices are not vital, so I won't look for their drivers. Among them: firewire, modem, card reader, wifi/bluetooth.

After two days I can call myself happy with the result, now I will try some old software and games and see what happens. I am sure that there will be issues and incompatibilities. If you have any idea or commentary on how to do things better, please feel free to do so. I only wanted to share my experience. My main concern at the moment is how I can try to make the Windows XP installation work again, since the only way to boot the machine is via HDD.

Thanks