Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

28 Jan 2016

...
 mark at markesystems.com wrote: 
...
   Date: Thu, 28
Jan 2016 11:44:44 -0500
 From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to>
 Subject: Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives?

 I run Windows 98SE on a 14 year old Pentium III.  I have
 replaced the power supply twice and all three hard disk drives.  
  QUESTION:  Is it even possible to run Win98SE on
a current
 Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard disk drives?  I realize that it might
 be possible under a virtual machine, but I really want all of the
 advantages that Win98SE provides.  One problem, of course, 

 Almost certainly not, at least practically.  Even if you can get it to 
 boot and install, it will have no idea how to handle any of the modern 
 peripherals, and drivers certainly won't be available.  So sound won't 
 work, the screen will be limited to VGA-16, and I'm not sure about the 
 keyboard and mouse (there's a reasonable chance that the BIOS will 
 emulate the legacy PS-2 devices, just as it's abstracting the details 
 of the SATA disks).  
Then I am really confused.  I have two older systems that
are able to run 64-bit Windows 7, an E8400 and a Q9550.
Both take SATA drives which are still available.  The mother
boards are ASUS5B.  I would guess they are both about
7 years old and I would hope that some of that old hardware
might be a bit easier to find.

I can also still boot from both system using an old DOS 3.5"
floppy media and run Ghost 7.0 with these old SATA drives,
but as far as I can understand, using the device drivers on the
floppy drive.

Is it likely that either of these two systems be able to run
Win98SE with the SATA hard drives, in one case 500 GB
each and the other system has 1 TB drives.  In that case, it
would still be possible to use current SATA drives, but the
1 GB limit on physical memory for Win98SE would need
to be patched.  By the way, the Pentium III that is 12 years
old has 768 MB of memory, so it is possible to run Win98SE
with more than 500 MB of physical memory.

As I mentioned, the only two applications I would run would
be the DOS variant of Ersatz-11 and Netscape 7.2 for e-mail
and newsgroups.

Jerome Fine