Well, now that I installed windows 98 while using XT-IDE (see below), I'm not sure if this will work for me. I am getting very slow hard drive access. Windows 98 SE install took almost an hour, and this PC is not that slow (Pentium MMX 233, 64 MB RAM, intel 430TX chipset). DOS seems to work fine, though. I think I misconfigured something on the XT-IDE file, or maybe the intel chipset is not correctly supported by the XT-IDE BIOS. Something interesting that I noticed is that the hard drive is nowhere to be found on the Windows 98 device manager. It usually is on "Disk drives" category, showing as Type 47 hard drive, but now using XT-IDE it's nowhere. Maybe a driver is needed? Any ideas guys?
jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-07-09, 04:25:
The reason your boot order isn't relevant is because XT-IDE is "SCSI" from your BIOS's perspective.
Booting from CD-ROM is code named El Torito. I don't see that anywhere on the XT-IDE website. I'm not sure if there is a way the XT-IDE can pass control back to your normal BIOS so that it can turn around and boot from CD-ROM though.
There is a program called Smart Boot Manager you can write to your hard drive's boot sector that you may have luck with as it generates a boot menu and one option is boot from CD-ROM.
Thanks for the suggestion about Smart Boot Manager. I got the latest version (which is almost 20 yers old!) and installed successfully, however the boot from CDROM would not work. It tries, the CDROM spins, but then some garbled characters appear on screen and nothing else happens.
jaZz_KCS wrote on 2020-07-09, 07:22:
Why don't you copy over your W98 setup folder onto the hard disk (another DATA partition would be better) to omit having to boot from CD, and install from there? This is the recommend method as it not only goes much faster but also will never nag you afterwards when installing Windows software as it will always automatically "finds the CD" when it needs setup files.
I managed to do this, and Windows 98 installed fine, thanks!
Thanks!