Windows 98 Second Edition is not installed properly on my new computer

[OrHoshmand]

Recently I bought a new computer, and on my new computer I have a difficulty that I didn't have on any computer before. When I tried to install Windows 98 Second Edition on my new computer I saw many errors, and I couldn't even finish installing Windows 98. Look at these errors:

I really didn't see these errors in my previous computers. My new computer is Dell Inspiron 5502, and its processor is 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz 1.38 GHz, and Windows 10 Home x64 20H2 build 19042.1110 is installed on my computer natively. I am afraid that my difficulties are related to the hardware, I tried to solve this problem in many ways and never solved it successfully.

[ajgringo619]

What version of Workstation Pro are you using? The last version of WS that supported Windows 98 was v8.

[OrHoshmand]

I am using VMware Workstation Pro 16.1.2, in this version everything was alright on my previous computers, but now I have a new computer and it doesn't work even though I use the same version. V8 looks very archaic to me.

[ajgringo619]

I'm sure it does. But you're trying to run an OS that was built over 20 years ago. If there's some particular app you need to run, why not try it on your host and use the compatibility settings to make it run as Windows 98?

[ender_]

While I haven't tried installing Windows 98 in VMWare in a long time, the Win98 VM I set up years ago (and several computers back) mostly works on my Ryzen 5900X (there's an error from RUNDLL about powrprof.dll on startup, and Explorer randomly doesn't show any contents). OTOH, Windows 95 VM won't start due to a known problem with Windows 95 and very fast machines (however it does run if I restore a snapshot where it was running while the snapshot was taken).

You might have more luck running these ancient OSes on an emulator, such as 86box.

[OrHoshmand]

But 86Box doesn't have virtual machine tools.

[OrHoshmand]

What do you mean "compatibility settings"?

[ajgringo619]

It's how you can force an older program to run on Windows 10 properly. For example, here's my Diablo II shortcut:

I'm running it as if the OS was Windows XP SP2. As I mentioned, if you just need a program or two, this may be an option instead of trying to install Windows 98.

[OrHoshmand]

I don't think it works with VMware Workstation.

[bluefirestorm]

I am able to install/run a Windows 98 Second Edition VM on version 15.5.7 with an Ubuntu host with i7-8700K CPU.

Perhaps we can check the CPU feature capabilities of the 11th gen i5 you have. No guarantees that it will work but perhaps masking the host CPU features might let it work.

If you can attach the vmware.log of Windows 98 VM or share the appropriate sections

vmx| I005: hostCPUID
vmx| I005: Host VT-x Capabilities:
I005: FeatureCompat: Capabilities:
I005: FeatureCompat: Requirements:

[OrHoshmand]

[bluefirestorm]

That screenshot of the CPU features using Intel Processor Identification Utility does not tell us any more than what we already can find out from the Intel ARK website.

The vmware.log would show a lot of technical details in terms of what the CPUID instruction returns and specific virtualisation features it finds. Therefore the vmware.log would be lot of more useful.

[OrHoshmand]

I see that this problem is very hard to solve on my computer. In any way, does anyone today have a computer with a processor from a recent generation and still doesn't have the problem that I have?

[bluefirestorm]

I just noticed in the Processor Identification Utility screenshot you posted it shows that Virtualization Technology and EPT have an X mark instead of a check. Is Virtualisation enabled in the UEFI of the Inspiron 5502 that you have? From the service manual, it should be ON by default.

https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/inspiron-15-5502-laptop_service-manual_en-us.pdf#page=71

Plus if VT-x was off in the UEFI, power on of other VMs (not just Windows 98) would also fail.

The latest CPU that I have is the i7-8700K. My best guess is that there could be some differences in the EDX register of CPUID leaf 7 as this register has been used by Intel to indicate presence/absence of fixes to the different Spectre bug variants. I am not aware of any announcement whether Intel deprecated 16-bit instructions in the 11th gen CPUs, which an old OS like Windows 98 is likely to be still be using.

Here is the EDX register of my i7-8700K (in bold red) from a vmware.log of one of my VMs.

I005: hostCPUID level 00000007, 0: 0x00000000 0x029c6fbf 0x40000000 0x9c002600

If you don't have the vmware.log of the Windows 98, any vmware.log of any VM within the same host should give the same information.

[OrHoshmand]

Is Intel Core i7 better than Intel Core i5 in running Windows 98?

[bluefirestorm]

I don't think there would be significant difference between i7 and i5. There are subtle differences (even between i7 of the same generation) depending on whether or not there is vPro indicated as "Yes" in the Intel ARK webpage

In this case, the i5-1135G7 does not have vPro.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/208658/intel-core-i5-1135g7-processor-8m-cache-...

The vPro having indicated as Yes has a difference in the VMCS Shadowing feature but this should only matter for performance reasons if you want to have nested VMs (i.e. running VM within another VM).

I005: Use VMCS shadowing {0,1}

So I think your vmware.log with Inspiron 5502 host will show Use VMCS shadowing {0} since it does not have vPro.

Roughly, what is the English translation of the error messages in the screenshots you put in the original post?

[OrHoshmand]

That's it, I found a solution. I installed this patch: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x . This patch solved my problem.