Can you please give me any help on installing Win98se on an external hard drive ? My main OS is Win XP and I can't seem to install 98se on the external drive. I can't boot up XP in DOS. Any help would be greatly appreciated. As I have several old programs which I can't use on XP. Such as Adobe Illustrator. Which would be too expensive to get the latest version.

According to here (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/15/113811.aspx), it's not possible to install Windows on any external devices connected to a PC by USB or Firewire.

Have you considered partitioning your hard drive and just having a dual boot system? Also have you tried running these old programs in Compatibility Mode (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/appcompat.mspx)?

payter,

Yes you can boot off USB. However, your motherboard has to support it, the USB drive must be listed before any internal hard drive in the boot order setup, and the USB device must be bootable.

Some references:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1676

Good luck

Casey

I'm still not sure if it will work. The first document you linked to Casey stated:

Windows as it exists today is currently not optimized to run as an installed operating system from USB attached mass-storage or CD.
The second article concentrated on installing Linux on the USB drive.

Win 98 NEEDS to be on the C drive. It will not boot any other way. You can put Win XP on a different drive however. This would mean wiping clean your machine, installing Win 98, then installing WIN XP on a different drive.

I would not, however, use an external drive. Instead I would partition your internal drive. You can get away with a 2G partition for Win 98 and 10G for Win XP. Then the rest can be divided into data and programs.

I would agree with the suggestion for trying compatibility mode.

I decided to do a little experiment on my systems and on one of my motherboards (Abit Fatality AA8XE, 925XE) I'm able to install Windows 98 on an external USB drive (not without some complications though and some tricking the system by disabling internal drives first). On my Asus 955X based chipset MB I was able to do a similar install on both a USB drive and on a SATA on the go drive. Again, I ran into some difficulties and had to trick by disabling internal drives. Installing XP or Linux on external drives posed no problems for me at all and I didn't have to disable any internal drives first either.

So can it be done? Yes. Is it the easiest thing? No and chances are it wouldn't work with an older motherboard. I would have to agree with ScottGem and LTheobald and also recommend that the dual boot method would be easier.

Casey


P.S. The toughest part of the whole thing was finding a Windows 98 CD.