if he'd turn the fucking heat on, i wouldn't have to do that.
i have to hope this isn't permanent in terms of severity. but, it's at least not seeping in through the window. one thing at a time.
i'm almost done the install, but these old systems are finnicky and i had to try a few things. i thought i could just load windows 98 to a fat32 partition and let boot.ini deal with it, but it wouldn't do it. so, i had to copy the files on the drive off to a usb key in the win pe environment (from a vista disc), remove all the partitions, boot from a windows 98 floppy boot disk (which i somewhat amazingly actually still have), create a new partition with fdisk and install 98 to it. and, i got it up and running - only to realize i didn't have any drivers, and am hardly going to connect to the internet (with windows 98) looking for them. so, i tried to plug a usb key in, but that's no good - i don't have a usb key small enough for windows 98 to read. short of burning cds, the only other solution is to create a "swap disk", install xp and drop the drivers in that way. which i was going to need to do anyways...
this old pIII 500 machine, in an asus p3bf board, was built for windows 98. at the time, i had 512 mb of ram, which was impressive. this is the machine i used to record everything up until about 2006 - all the inri stuff, all the rabit stuff, all the deny everything stuff, most of the trivial group stuff and even a bunch of stuff i haven't finished yet (which is why i'm rebuilding it in it's old state) - although it was almost all remastered and remixed on the new system from 2014-2017. i upgraded from 98 to xp in 2004 to install matlab for a course in wavelet design. the machine was never the same after that, and i bought a new machine altogether in 2006...
after that, the pIII became a glorified typewriter and i built an image for it in 2008 that was intended for that purpose. this image was full of word processors and freeware math software, much of it initially written for linux before being ported to xp. i spent a lot of time writing mathml reports on it. but, i also used it for email and internet debates.
when i moved to windsor, that purpose was taken over by a laptop, and i converted it into a multimedia pc, intended to exist in the living room. i built a second image for that purpose, that was a little more focused on multimedia applications.
i want the new image to be a union of these two images and may end up building a new image for it in the long run, if frequent reinstalls become necessary. for now, i'm going to start with the image i built in 2014 and see if i can just tweak the scripts a little to get the new drivers in.
xp doesn't let you create partitions on the install screen, so i booted into gparted and created two ntfs partitions for the xp install (an os partition and a partition for the script) and a swap partition to get data back and forth. but, when i came up to the install, i noticed that it labeled the partition i want to install to "d:". i decided that this may screw the install up, but i could relabel the partitions when it was done and just do it again.
unfortunately, it wouldn't let me relabel the boot partition. well, i know i can fix it manually if i have to, but why bother? i then remembered that the trick is to set the 98 partition to hidden during the xp install, to make the xp install process only see the partitions it needs to see, namely the os partition and the script partition. this works because now xp and 98 both see themselves as "c:\". the trick, then, is building the boot menu, afterwards.
so, i went back and did it again:
0. to do this you need a live rescue disc (win pe or gparted), a 98 cd, a 98 floppy and an xp cd.
1. delete all partitions in gparted (or win pe, if you need to copy files first)
2. make sure you have your 98 boot floppy along with your boot cd, and boot to the floppy
3. create the fat 32 partition in fdisk and reboot to the cd
4. finish installing 98 to the fat32 partition
5. boot into gparted and create the ntfs partition for xp, along with whatever other partitions you want. set the 98 partition to hidden and the xp partition to boot.
6. boot into the xp install and carry through with it, whatever that means to you. for me, i have an unattended dvd installation...
7. boot back into gparted and unhide the 98 partition.
there's two approaches from this point.
1. you could just set one or the other as bootable with gparted whenever you want to use it. when you boot into 98, it won't see the xp drive at all because it's ntfs. when you boot into xp, it will see the 98 drive as just files. that's the tactic i'm going to use for now.
2. if you want a boot menu, you need to install a non-windows os to a third partition. so, you could set up a dummy ubuntu install, for example. i'm not doing that right now.
you can't do this using boot.ini without getting stuck with a d:\windows, and i'd advise against that.
