So I have been installing games onto the computer in 98 and decided to install some dos games and not being very familiar with dos, I find that I need to find and install a cd driver and probably a mouse one as well, you would have thought they they were their already.

Anyone know why when I clone my windows XP hard drive to a SSD, then boot from the SSD it does not work?.

<scratches head> I can barely recall last week, let alone the workings of 98 and XP.

Hmm WinXP supports SSDs, could the boot record have been altered. I believe you can install XP via USB stick so you could try that. I know XP only accepts 2TB drive space so make sure your drive is lower than that limit. WinXP default drivers should allow most keyboards and mice to be recognized. Been a long time since I attempted a XP install 🙂

Have you tried doing this in like VirtualBox?

Seem to be something to do with the MBR on the new clone drive of the XP install or maybe the home edition of XP can't handle SSD, bit more fiddling is required. 😀 Also I'm going through a SATA to IDE converter which may be adding to the problem. might try a SATA hard drive instead of the SSD. 

Sound cards, never bothered with back in XP days but I have become really taken with them, especially the EAX which is supported by a number of games. 

Looks like my XP hard drive is dead and the clone I made of it does not work, nuts start again.

Ran into a strange problem with my 98 computer as I can not create folders on the hard drive, dose not seem to be a problem for the computer as it can create it's own folders for games.

Think I now have all the parts for my XP rebuild, decided to abandon my Athlon 64 and go with a core2 duo.

Strange things are afoot as a couple of months ago I installed Freespace and it ran like a slide show, did not think much about it until last weekend when I installed Red Faction, which also runs like a slide show.

No idea what's going on apart from both games are made by Volition but are about a decade apart from each other. 

Is this a dedicated box Pinback or you multi-booting a higher end PC?

Eventually I need to try a WinXP setup.... usually I emulate the environment since its cheaper than building a box 😉 You can still pickup older Soundblaster 32/64 cards which have EAX and work with WinXP. SATA shouldn't be an issue on XP as long as the storage isn't too big, but ideally you would probably want a older IDE drive.... but a lot of this older hardware you think would be cheap, but its not usually unless you go to yard sales haha.

I know you may need to install the older Microsoft Visual C++ 2005/2008 distros to get those older Directx games working, also need old Directx drivers too.

It's original hardware for 98 computer and XP systems.

So in my efforts to make the slowest win98 machine unlike most youtuber who seem to want to make the fastest win89 I have a acquired a 750 MHz Duron. 

Now I think that is getting close the slowest speed for the Duron and if I want to go slower I will have to change motherboards.

Also having been inspired by Youtubers I have had a go at replacing some capacitors on a motherboard and amazingly it work after I replaced them with new ones.  

Posted by: @pinback

So in my efforts to make the slowest win98 machine unlike most youtuber who seem to want to make the fastest win89 I have a acquired a 750 MHz Duron. 

Now I think that is getting close the slowest speed for the Duron and if I want to go slower I will have to change motherboards.

Also having been inspired by Youtubers I have had a go at replacing some capacitors on a motherboard and amazingly it work after I replaced them with new ones.  

Nice Pinback, was replacing capacitors or any other motherboard parts to increase stability? Have you been able to game on the rig yet, how has it been especially with sound/music 🙂 Back in the day I always had no problem playing games with a voodoo gfx card so if you can find one of those on ebay cheap that may help too.

No the capacitors I replaced were on a Pentium 4 motherboard as I picked up a couple of bundles on eBay last year which have some damaged motherboards, with the intension of using them to improve my soldering skills.

Love to get a Voodoo card but they are pretty expensive and any cheaper one usually have somthing wrong with them.

Spent the weekend trying to get XP on my old computer and finally managed to get it installed only to find that those buggers at Microsoft have canned the phone in activation 😭 😭

which is annoying as I know it was working last November, might try the register hack as I got nothing to lose trying it. 

My mistake as you can still register XP by phone, if you do it in the evening or out of business hours you get the automatic one and in the daytime it is only windows 10/11 and you can speak to someone. 

Posted by: @pinback

you can still register XP by phone

Awesome! Back in the day, I re-registered my XP by phone, and only a couple of years ago, I re-registered my Win7 via auto.

Pick up a Pentium 3 motherboard with AGP, PCI AND ONE ISA slot on it only problem is, it has 12 blown cap on it, but if I can fix it then I will be able to get an even slower 98 machine.

Why are you messing around with that PC trash Pinback!?! You have a perfectly good Amiga just sitting there! 🤤 

Posted by: @geraldine

Why are you messing around with that PC trash Pinback!?! You have a perfectly good Amiga just sitting there! 🤤 

Well, probably a number of different reasons but I think one of the main ones is that I was still using my Amiga 1200 up till about 2000, then I went to the dark side. 🤣 So I missed out on what many consider to be the golden age of PC gaming, granted their were a few ports to the PlayStation but they were never that good like Wing Commander 3 which springs to mind.