www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk

Pick up the above and installed the ide hard drive from my old 98se computer

So, there's this box sat on the desk looking pretty, and I can open it up and view whats on it, haven't tried writing to it yet, but should be ok.

The big question is, if I was to set it as a slave, could I partition it to take a different operating system (98se) as part of the main computer/laptop, through the usb port.

And how, couldn't find anything in my idiots guide for dummy's, come to that, I couldn't find anything anywhere, perhaps no-one's tried it yet.

I think you'll need to connect the disk internally with an IDE cable. I'm don't think you'll be able to boot the OS via a USB connection.

How about through an expansion port.

Assuming you can get A ribbon for it.

What kind of expansion port? The disk would need to be connected via IDE, SATA, or eSATA in order to boot the OS. I'd have thought you'd have sufficient IDE ports on your PC, unless you've got a lot of hard drives or optical drives. I'm assuming it's an IDE disk as it's from the 98SE era.

I have an expansion port 2 on the computer.

I'm trying to run old hardware and information disc no longer available. with no driver updates.

Do you know what type of connection expansion port 2 is? No matter how you connect the drive, if you want to dual boot you'll need drivers for the computer hardware. Are you wanting to run 98SE because you need to run hardware, which you can't run on XP?

No idea what the connection is, I could probably find out in the manual.

Yes, to the 2nd part, hardware and an interactive disc program.

I have another plan if you don't think it will work

Most modern PCs will boot from the USB port and there are even XP USB Memory stick Boot Disks going around.

Check your BIOS (at boot up) to see if you can set the boot option to boot via USB as first choice.

I think you'll have trouble getting 98SE to boot from USB, but by all means give it a try. I would recommend looking inside your PC to see if you have room for the old hard disk. If you have an IDE ribbon cable with a spare connection, plug the old hard disk into this. Make sure that if you have two devices plugged into the same ribbon cable that you set one device to be the master and one to be the slave using the jumpers next to the power and IDE connections on the back of the disk. You can then install 98SE in a dual boot setup with XP. If you're not familiar with the connectors this may help you http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm? ... 778&page=2

Will do that.

Thanks guys.

chat_to_rich wrote:I think you'll have trouble getting 98SE to boot from USB, but by all means give it a try. I would recommend looking inside your PC to see if you have room for the old hard disk. If you have an IDE ribbon cable with a spare connection, plug the old hard disk into this. Make sure that if you have two devices plugged into the same ribbon cable that you set one device to be the master and one to be the slave using the jumpers next to the power and IDE connections on the back of the disk. You can then install 98SE in a dual boot setup with XP. If you're not familiar with the connectors this may help you http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm? ... 778&page=2

Primarily I use the laptop so no it definitely wont fit

I'll play some more and see what I can break.

If the old hard disk won't boot via USB you could always get a 2nd hard disk the same as your current laptop one. You could put that in you laptop and install 98SE on it. You could then swap over the hard disks depending upon what OS you wanted to run. It would be a bit of a faff, but might be worth a go. Of course this would also require you to have 98SE compatible drivers for your laptop.

I still have the 98se windows disc from the old computer.

Perhaps the best way would be a new motherboard for the old computer.

From what I can understand you had 98SE running on an old computer in order to use a piece of hardware and a separate program that only runs on 98SE. The motherboard on this computer has broken, so you need to setup a new install of 98SE. Can you confirm whether you have the drivers for the piece of hardware and what it is.

If you have 98SE drivers for your laptop you could dual boot XP and 98SE by re-partitioning your existing laptop hard disk.

If 98SE won't run on your laptop, meaning you can't dual boot, you could use virtualisation software to run 98SE. VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/is a free download that lets you run multiple machines on one physical computer. You could install VirtualBox on your laptop and then create a virtual machine to run 98SE. This will let you run your interactive disk program, but wouldn't run your piece of hardware if you don't have the drivers. Even if you do have the drivers it may be tricky to get the hardware to work with a virtual machine, although VirtualBox does let you run some USB devices even if you don't have drivers for the host OS, which in your case is XP. One issue with this solution is that VirtualBox has limited support for 98SE, so it may run a bit slow. Take a look here for more info http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9918

The third option is to get a replacement motherboard for your old computer and put the old hard disk back in it and carry on as before!

Hardware is an Agfa photo scanner and camera

Discs I can live without, but it's become a challenge

Ok what we have is an 98se duel HD, with a duff motherboard.

3 laptops running xp, a a Macbook Pro.

And a 95 I just picked up from Mooncat to play with.