Choose the appropriate operating system for your retro PC drive upgrade and follow the installation steps carefully.
Choose the appropriate operating system for your retro PC drive upgrade and follow the installation steps carefully.
I own this 26-year-old Pentium PC that my grandparents got me about two years ago. It runs perfectly except for one major issue—the IDE HDD boots extremely slowly. I’m considering swapping it out for an SSD connected via a SATA-to-IDE adapter. Right now the old drive has Windows 98 installed, and I’m keeping it for nostalgia. I’m unsure which older operating system to install, as there are many options. The bigger challenge is getting DOS onto the machine. I have an ISO for DOS 7.1, but I don’t have any CDs. I suspect this computer can’t read DVDs, so I’m leaning toward using a floppy disk. I don’t have a USB drive (that’s disappointing), but my Pentium 4 with XP should be able to create a bootable floppy. My main question is: can I burn an ISO to a floppy and make it boot? Also, what OS should I choose—Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, or Windows ME?
Windows 98 SE seems like a solid choice since it was released when most systems had some hardware support. XP might also offer the chance to create a bootable floppy during formatting. You can also locate a bootable Windows 98 SE ISO to burn onto a CD, which helped me upgrade my old PC without relying on DOS or a floppy drive.
Initially, did you pick a suitable SSD size for reliable operation? You might run into issues with BIOS support for most standard capacities. A bootable OS CD is usually best, and personally I’d prefer Windows 98 SE. The challenge lies in locating the correct version that recognizes your original registration code. If you have the Win98 OEM edition installed, you can only reinstall that specific release, not newer or retail versions. I don’t compare yourself to using a floppy drive—I’ve struggled to reinstall my Pentium 4 laptops with WinXP because the recovery CDs are no longer available and none of the ISOs accept the registration code.
You could restate this as: It was a journey, but I’ve moved forward. The system refused to load on a floppy, so I created a boot loader for Windows 98 that lets the PC boot from the upgrade disc in the CDROM reader. Still facing another issue—setup.exe only starts scanning the registry and then gets stuck with a cursor that keeps blinking.