Win98-quickinstall: A framework and installer to quickly install Windows 98

https://github.com/oerg866/win98-quickinstall

by userbinator • 1 year ago

207 120 1 year ago

Good work, I still use Windows 9X for emulation for DOS, 16 bit Windows, and 32 bit Windows programs. I do legacy systems and retro programming on them.

krige2• 1 year ago

What do you use it on? Do you have dedicated hardware, dosbox/pcem, a vitrual machine of some sort?

orionblastar2• 1 year ago

Virtual Box VM.

imiric• 1 year ago

Very cool!

Is there an equivalent tool for Windows 11? I've used MSMG Toolkit and NTLite in the past to slim down the ISO, but it was a very manual and tedious process, and I still have to babysit the installation itself. I would like a tool that takes a predefined config file of what to remove, and then creates a fully unassisted installer. Obviously bypassing the online account shenanigans.

SpecialistK2• 1 year ago

From my understanding, as someone whose job was Windows deployment for a few years, is... kind of? Admittedly my experience is with deploying to a lot of machines at the same time rather than to several machines more frequently.

You can use audit mode from the OOBE of a fresh install, install your apps and changes, then run sysprep /generalize to clear the GUIDs and return to the OOBE - capture the image after the generalize but before reboot into the OOBE and the image will be a generalized install. All you need to do is restore the image (using a disk cloning software, dd from *nix, or a network server like FoG) create a ESP to boot from, and you have an image that can copy to any device at the speed of the disk or network.

Microsoft has a Deployment Toolkit (MDT) which can take a Windows install image (a WIM) and copy it to a machine then run other tasks as part of a Task Sequence. This is handy for small to medium sized businesses: a WIM can be a sysprepped image like mentioned a paragraph up, so you can include big changes like removing features or installing apps and updates. But then it can be configured, using a Task Sequence and/or an XML file, to do things after the Windows install like join a domain, create a local account, install certain apps, run Windows Update, etc. It also supports driver detection and installation. MDT can be accessed using a USB boot drive or a PXE network boot (Windows Deployment Services, WDS) and then you just choose the Task Sequence you want then walk away for an hour. But there is a learning curve: people have whole careers specializing in this stuff. There is a more expensive and powerful MS solution called SCCM that can do much the same stuff (and a lot lot more) but the concepts are the same.

What Microsoft are pushing toward now is what I'll call the "smartphone model" - IT departments don't reimage a machine as soon as it shows up, but instead register the device with a MDM like Intune. When the end-user receives the device, they are forced to use a corporate Microsoft account and then the desired configuration is pushed from the cloud. Without a MDM configuration ("Windows Autopilot") you can use a tool called WICD to create a configuration and save it as a "Provisioning package" which, when on the root of a USB drive that's inserted during the OOBE, will do the same configuration steps. I call this the smartphone model because according to MS, the Windows "factory reset" feature is all you would ever need rather than a traditional wipe-and-reinstall.

What I would advise for a home poweruser is to build a Windows image 2-3x a year in a virtual machine: do all your updates and tweaks and app installs in a VM, then capture the image using your disk cloning tool of choice (I do a bootable Linux session plus dd piped into gzip), preferably to a network share. Then use that tool on your target devices to restore the image: it will write at about 112MB/s over gigabit Ethernet and after the reboot will install your drivers and make the install unique.

razakel• 1 year ago

WDS has been deprecated - you now need to use Configuration Manager. Which means giving them more money. Because of course it does.

Gansejunge• 1 year ago

I stumbled upon this tool [1] recently that does not slim down the image like you might want to but gives you a lot of options what to remove via an .xml file [1] https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

rasz2• 1 year ago

60-90 seconds

Thats impressive speed for an install that not just copies pre-installed system, but also includes Hardware detection and selective driver installation phase.

szundi• 1 year ago

Linux detects all your hardware and use drivers accordingly at every boot - some seconds

sneak• 1 year ago

Linux can be easily and simply modified by anyone to suit their needs; Win98 cannot. You are comparing apples to oranges.

badgersnake• 1 year ago

Did it do that so comprehensively and reliably in 1998?

iforgotpassword2• 1 year ago

with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking

This is nice. I've always wondered why they don't do this with the core parts of the os and then only extract additional components and drivers. But maybe back then the core was only a few MB and it wouldn't have helped so much...

I remember the setup taking ages. With 9x I don't think any install ever lasted longer than a year, so I did this a lot. :)

h0l0cube• 1 year ago

This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.

keyringlight2• 1 year ago

This is definitely an interesting part of it. Copying a few hundred megs from CD to HDD doesn't take long even for old hardware, but when I was setting up a win98 rig last autumn to test some 3dfx cards it took the common ~45 minutes to get through the main install, and that's before you get into the post-install cycle of installing any software/drivers/updates that need reboots. The "unofficial service pack3" is one I'd love to integrate as it includes support for USB mass storage which made the machine a lot easier to work with

On a side-note, walking the line between annoying and entertaining was the noise of the HD during install, which sounded like techno music and I should have recorded it. Weirdly it was only during the win98 install that it made that type of sound.

BloodOverdrive• 1 year ago

Interesting. Will try.

CursedSilicon• 1 year ago

I debated building something like this for a couple years with my "Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1]

I found that I could take the machine to vintage computer events and it would (generally!) behave the entire event. I'd then take it home and put it back on the shelf for a few months. After I'd bring it back down to use it again, it'd throw a fit and usually require a reinstall! It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout

While this hasn't happened (this time) it's a constant looming concern, particularly when pressed for time to get something up and running for an event.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETxI4rA_gs

nurettin• 1 year ago

I remember having to constantly reinstall win98 back in the 2000s. It felt like the OS kept corrupting its own filesystem. I ended up "borrowing" a debian potato CD from a professor's desk and never went back to windows (or his office).

pndy3• 1 year ago

Back then reinstall without formatting the drive felt like resetting system to defaults and was practised by almost everyone. I'm pretty sure W10 and W11 has similar feature nowadays by default.

When I had chance to grab 180-days trial of W2000 I was shocked how stable it was - not seeing blue screen every few mins but modals with errors instead was... an amazing experience. The store where I've got my Celeron-based machine was installing 98 for everyone, not looking at licenses, all the legal stuff at all and when I ask guys there if they could drop W2000 they said that "it's a bad idea - many games won't work".

geon• 1 year ago

It did.

Or perhaps it was because I dualbooted 98 and 2k.

All my warez were on a fat32 to be accessible from both. Somehow the audio in my mp3 collection got replaced with audio from my movies.

reginald782• 1 year ago

Windows 9x suffered from DLL hell. So every time a program was installed it potentially overwrote dlls with a different version often older or incompatible. Windows 2000/XP just redirected the installer's dlls into a per program location preventing this which is a large reason those versions were so much more stable.

Most people recommended a complete reinstall every 6 months well through the XP era but I found this was hardly ever necessary after I switched to 2000. Conversely, during my 98 days I never had to schedule reinstalls, Windows had rotted apart by then forcing me to do it!

eloeffler• 1 year ago

While I have no idea if this is or isn't the reason for those issues, I think it's worth mentioning that SSDs do suffer from bit rot, especially when left unpowered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-l...

userbinator5• 1 year ago

It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout

SSDs, unless they're very old SLC/MLC ones, do actually suffer from bit rot a lot more than magnetic/optical media. The unpowered retention ratings of new TLC/QLC flash is rather horrifying (months, not years or decades like they used to be).

https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro...

https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-re...

If you want a reliable SSD for old systems, an SLC-based CF card is a good choice; it doesn't need to be very big (8GB is plenty), and the retention characteristics are also "period-correct".

b112• 1 year ago

While these posts are well written, one is about a cheap Chinese flash manufacturer, the other unknown, and the author muses that it may be the control chip or firmware, not the flash itself.

Animats• 1 year ago

Is there something that lets you install Windows 7 64 bit as a new install? That's the last version before ads and other unwanted features.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

You can install Windows Firewall Control, some v4.9.x.x (before someone acquired it and ruined it by changing it drastically on v5 onward) and block all the garbage.

Then you can also use ClassicShell and have the 'good old Start Menu' as you prefer to have it.

There are also a bunch of privacy tools that can disable most of the garbage/uninstall the "Apps" and improve privacy with a few clicks.

I stayed in Windows 10 for 7-8 years. After I tried Win10 and I saw how my machine(s) work better on the same (10yo hardware) I switched everything to Win10 with the above 'measures' (plus the hosts from someonewhocares) and I haven't had any annoyances for years.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysprep

yyyk• 1 year ago

"my digital life" forum has many scripts for windows 7 installation (including patches).

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

Fun fact: I (re)installed windows 98 so many times due to crashes, slowness, viruses etc that even now, 20 years later, I remember every digit of the 25 digit activation key.

Codes• 1 year ago

And I'll bet I remember the exact same key ;)

alabastervlog2• 1 year ago

I still almost remember all of a certain infamous "FCKGW" key for WinXP.

Haven't installed it in... 20 years?

userbinator5• 1 year ago

W7XTC-2YWFB-..?

ramijames• 1 year ago

Funnily enough, I use this as the base for my password (plus some other stuff) for anything I need strong protection for.

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

I hope you weren’t also using the key above then…

RedShift1• 1 year ago

This may install fast but it certainly looks hard to get going with it...

rasz2• 1 year ago

This project builds the installer, there is nothing, other than Microsoft copyright, stopping someone from hosting compiled Install CD itself.

piokoch• 1 year ago

Who on earth would like to install that?

I can understand installing Win 95, sentiments, blah, blah, first "real" windows MS system (Win 3.X was still some kind of windows manager on top of DOS).

But 98?

Maybe let's go hardcore and go with Win 98ME, the worst operating system ever (with Vista as a strong second-place contender), at least we can experience random blue screens, which were the major feature introduced by 98ME, and that surely should be replicated by a simulator, to feel those old vibes.

rickdeckard• 1 year ago

Apparently a fringe opinion, but Win98SE was IMO the best iteration of Win95.

For me it was faster, more stable, more polished than Win95.

(a bit more bloated with the IE-integration, but that was easy to strip away)

fps_doug23• 1 year ago

Your memory seems to fail you. Win98SE was the most stable of the 9x series. ME was the bad one.

Zambyte• 1 year ago

Your reading seems to fail you. That's what they said :-)

barotalomey2• 1 year ago

Win98SE was the final usable Win9x version and the most stable version of them all.

There's a crapload of late 90s / early 00s Windows games that isnt compatible with modern Windows, so running or emulating Win9X is really the only way of accessing them.

If you are doing Win9X today, you would only be using Win98SE or you're doing it wrong.

And let's not mention Windows Millenium again.

keyringlight2• 1 year ago

One of the big changes with ME was cutting out DOS mode as much as they could, and if you're doing a system for retro computing then it's hard to see why you'd constrain what it's capable of. If you don't need that and you've blacklisted 95/98 then I don't see why you wouldn't go for win2k onwards as it'll be a lot easier to work with, but it's a different animal.

accrual7• 1 year ago

I just wanted to add that Windows 3.X is capable of running independently of DOS and BIOS calls. By default yes, it uses the BIOS for disk access. But with a disk driver (e.g. Microhouse driver, FastDisk driver), Windows 3.X can live entirely in 32-bit protected mode. Windows 95/98/Me are the same way, they are real 16/32-bit hybrid kernels that used DOS as a bootstrap but nothing more.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

After getting blue screened one too many times with Windows 98, I ordered a Red Hat Linux CD.

I never went back to Windows and still use Linux to this day, nowadays with NixOS.

tpoacher• 1 year ago

Running Win98 is still the most reliable way to get Discworld Noir to actually run; a gem of a game, made almost useless by the aggressive DRM practices of the time.

Bookmarking this for future use :)

pathartl3• 1 year ago

For games like these I tend to use a base Win98 image with DOSBox and then mount the game as a separate drive, disable the Windows shell, and auto start the game.

LocutusOfBorges• 1 year ago

I’m surprised nobody has created a way to automate this process - I imagine that any tool that makes it trivial would be quite popular, given what a pain it can be to set up manually.

zb3• 1 year ago

For those who don't want to install: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

nness• 1 year ago

I have Win98 in an 86box just for fun, and yet it feels like that version runs much more smoothly...

accrual7• 1 year ago

Interesting! Maybe it's taking a more direct path to emulating the hardware. I found I have to use pretty modest emulated hardware in 86Box to have performant results.

submeta• 1 year ago

No offence to Windows lovers, but my God is this ugly. Current versions of Windows look great. But back then Windows looked horrible. Apple managed to produce beautiful interfaces back then, as they do now.

fps_doug23• 1 year ago

Sorry, but no.

This is MacOS in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_OS_8.1_emulated_insid...

I think this is way uglier than Win9x.

barotalomey2• 1 year ago

potato, potato.

And Bob's your uncle

smusamashah• 1 year ago

This reminds of the Ghost (was it Norton Ghost?) tool. I use to experiment with the file system and try out many many all kinds of softwares from Internet and software CDs. Those CDs use to come with 100s of softwares of all kind. I use to buy them and then try out every single one of them. I use to maintain an index, using IYF, to find a software in any of those CDs.

Anyway these softwares use to have there crack/patch tools with them (with music and effects and whatnot). These cracks often had virus or trojen in them. I have bored my windows many many times. Ghost helped with that immensely. I had 1 or 2 fresh install with basic setup ghost backup always available. After every bork, it only took a minute to restore my windows to fresh clean state. Kaspersky was the best anti virus back then, no other tool repaired my corrupted softwares like it. Norton anti virus use to scream only after getting infected itself.

We have it lot easy now.

unixhero• 1 year ago

Kaspersky was the very best, it could handle any bad case better than any of the others.

I used to use the cataloging software WhereIsIt. It was really genious.

txdv• 1 year ago

I also reinstalled windows one too many times and used norton backup.

I am not clever enough to understand that I could just do it with linux by disk dumping into an image, but hey, old times

dmd4• 1 year ago

Ghost was descended from my absolute favorite late-90s / early 00s tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack which, as you say, let you undo absolutely anything you did to your machine.

I wish I had something like it on Mac.

Synaesthesia2• 1 year ago

Superduper is a useful Mac utility, as is CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)

spmurrayzzz• 1 year ago

GoBack was great. I gotta believe there's a way to manually instrument this using `tmutil` to create incremental APFS snapshots and some middleware code that knows when to wait for for the FS to be idle, but that's handwaving a ton of details.

astrostl3• 1 year ago

GoBack was designed by Wild File, Inc., a company located in Plymouth, Minnesota. The software was shown at COMDEX in November 1998 and released in December 1998.
GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research.

^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack

As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.

101008• 1 year ago

Reminded of DiskFreeze (or something ismilar, Freeze was for sure in the name), that i installed in my PC after seeing it as some cyber cafes. Basically, one partition with all the software was under this DiskFreeze, and another partition / disk where I stored documents and files. DiskFreeze restored the disk/partition with OS+software on every restart, meaning that I was infected or corrupted or anything, a simple restart would fix the machine.

The trick to install a software was to disable it, restart, install it, enable it again and restart again. I only did that after installing a software and test it for a few hours or days, which of course didn't mean anything, but at least I didn't see any visible problem.

p1mrx• 1 year ago

Deep Freeze

rzzzt2• 1 year ago

XP had a good snapshot/restore tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState

You can install a write filter on later embedded versions of Windows but this was available for home or café use as well.

pixelbath• 1 year ago

It was simply "Ghost" before Norton bought it and made it more terrible and bloated over time. We (at a computer shop I worked at) used Ghost to build a pre-OOBE image for several common Windows configurations and then just image them to new PCs in a few minutes, then apply the license key afterward.

nigel_bree• 1 year ago

Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements.

Almost the entirety of the growth in the size of the imaging executable, which did get hugely bigger, came from a constant drive to add capability to the NTFS support to match the FAT support, most crucially to allow the images to be edited in Ghost Explorer. The initial NTFS support that Ghost had prior to the Symantec releases was really crude, basically the content in the .GHO file wasn't files, but a raw-ish dump of used disk extents that it tried to always put back in the same place to avoid having to fix up attribute runs, whereas the FAT16/FAT32 content was basically a file archive where all the filesystem allocation metadata got recreated on the fly.

Customers wanted and pushed hard to have NTFS images editable, and that made life really hard - the approach that was ultimately taken meant creating a full read/write NTFS implementation, and those aren't small. And the design of that code interacted really badly with the C++ exception implementation in DJGPP (which before that work had begun, I had warned them about), so that eventually exception frame information was taking up ~25% of the on-disk size of the UPX-compressed binary!

klaussilveira• 1 year ago

We need one of these for the Raspberry Pi, but native. And old monitor + pi inside would be an amazing retro PC build. I have it running on DosBox, but it's not that great.

naikrovek• 1 year ago

This is very cool but who is installing Win98 so much that this is useful?

That said I am all for this project, I just don’t know who would use it.

accrual7• 1 year ago

Retrocomputing has blasted off into a larger hobby as of late. I think it's a combination of COVID free time in 2020, plus the demographic that grew up with early Windows is now old enough to appreciate the OS more and wants to re-experience it with modern tools and knowledge.

I don't personally install Windows 98 nearly often enough to justify a tool like this, regular vanilla installs are fine with me. But some do a lot of benchmarking and testing on modern hardware, e.g. user "O_MORES" has a configuration to run Windows 98 alongside Windows 11 and frequently expands it.

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

This just begs the question: Why was the basic Win98 question so ^%$#^% slow?

wg0• 1 year ago

I'm too far away from a windows machine for far too long. Is it possible to run Windows 98 on modern hardware especially when no one would be shipping any drivers?

Also, what's the use case for it?

Lastly, wondering if MS still sells Windows 98 if someone needs because of some specific reason.

accrual7• 1 year ago

Yes, actually! Search for user "O_MORES". They're active on Reddit and possibly Vogons. They have successfully dual booted Windows 98 and Windows 10/11 on modern hardware. The key is to use a supported PCI/PCIe graphics, audio, and network cards then slot them into a modern motherboard. The sheer speed of modern hardware makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

For use cases - for me at least, it's for fun, nostalgia, and because I enjoy diving deeper into old hardware and OSs that I didn't have the experience to when they were new. Everyone has their own reasons, but I think this is a common one.

No need to buy Windows 98 anymore though, clean known-good OEM ISOs are available on WinWorldPC along with accompanying product keys.

rzzzt2• 1 year ago

Also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@O_mores/videos

chungy• 1 year ago

Lastly, wondering if MS still sells Windows 98 if someone needs because of some specific reason.

They do, in fact buying Windows in a commercial setting basically entitles you to all the prior versions: https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-...

Synaesthesia2• 1 year ago

I saw this demoed on this video where the guy builds the fastest DOS computer possible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LIPTQjQAPE

andix• 1 year ago

That's exactly what I was looking for, around 28 years ago ;)

redeeman• 1 year ago

but why not just install manually, keep an image?

Win98-quickinstall: A framework and installer to quickly install Windows 98

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