Musings on making a T42 dual boot XP and 98se

[Glaurung-quena]

Normally I use IBM's factory restore disks to install XP, since it bypasses activation and gives you all the drivers and utilities. There's crapware to uninstall, but that's simpler than ferreting out all the drivers and installing them. I did my homework on installing 98se after XP, and was prepared to manually create bootsect.dos, edit boot.ini, and restore the NTLDR after 98se blew it away.

Imagine my surprise and delight to see that after booting to DOS and installing 98se, on reboot I had a boot menu showing XP and 98se, without my having done anything, and booting into XP worked, without having to run startup repair.

I assume this happened because the restore disks had already set up a dual boot situation - after copying all the files to C from the restore partition, the restore process reboots into a version of ME DOS, runs a bunch of batch files, then reboots into XP. So 98SE setup saw the bootsect.dos and so forth already on the hard disk, and knew how to insert itself into the boot menu without destroying my ability to boot XP.

So that was nice.

Also nice: shrinking C and creating an extended D partition for 98se did not disrupt the hidden restore partition or the ability to access it with f11.

On to drivers:
1. The 98se audio driver Lenovo offers for the T42 does not work. elsewhere on this forum, matti157 said you should use the T30 driver, version 5.12.01.5160. That driver installs and works on the T42, unlike any others I tried.
2. The chipset drivers provided by Lenovo (intel infinst version 4.20.1009) resulted in IDE devices showing up as not working. Elsewhere, I found version 6.3.0.1007, which worked without issue.

3. As best I can tell, the following devices do not have 98se drivers, which is unfortunate:
- "PCI universal serial bus" - USB 2.0 functionality. The USB ports work without this, just at 1.1 speed.
- "unknown device" - device ID IBM0068, something about power management. The laptop goes to sleep without this, but closing the lid doesn't cause it to enter sleep mode.

4. And these also don't have drivers, but I don't care:
- "Biometric coprocessor" - the fingerprint reader.
- "PCI System management bus"
- "unknown device" - device ID ATM1100 - something about a "trusted platform module"

[Gonzaleitor]

Windows XP creates a dual boot screen automatically if you install it after Windows 98SE. It's got nothing to do with the original disks.
For USB in Win 98 use NUSB36e, not sure about the speeds, but it will let you use usb drives.
The only driver I haven't found yet is the fingerprint one, the rest are all available in the driver page of the forum. As you said, the driver for power management is the one for the T30(I believe A31s use the same).

[TPFanatic]

XP and 98se are products of a time when things were built to do work and be productive ad infinitum.

This is ironic aw I prosecute that T42 is a product of a context when ThinkPads were sold to holdover IBM until they could sell off the unprofitable PC division, which explains why they were such warranty disasters.

For Aristotle's sake I raise Occam and Hanlon to suggest more merciful arguments.

Ceteris paribus, it makes total sense to me that XP and 98se just work together. Microsoft had just survived 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001) so righteously enough produced an operating system compatible with the older operating system that was still in use. B2B moved to XP anyway irregardless. But this is an example of Collaboration Producing more Value than Competition, something the Economy needs to get back to recognizing before we Animal Farm ourselves.

[Glaurung-quena]

Windows XP creates a dual boot screen automatically if you install it after Windows 98SE. It's got nothing to do with the original disks.
For USB in Win 98 use NUSB36e, not sure about the speeds, but it will let you use usb drives.
The only driver I haven't found yet is the fingerprint one, the rest are all available in the driver page of the forum. As you said, the driver for power management is the one for the T30(I believe A31s use the same).

You misread. I installed XP, then 98se, which, from all reports, is not supposed to Just Work like this for dual boot.

Thanks for the tip re: T30 drivers for power management.

I do have NUSB36 installed, but the hardware page of the system control panel still shows the USB controller as unknown.

[Gonzaleitor]

Reinstall it in hardware management

[dijitalblue]

I'm trying to do the exact same thing as you. I have a refurbished T42 that I reinstalled the factory XP image with all the IBM goodies, now I'm trying to install 98SE on it in a dual boot configuration.

Since neither XP nor Win98 setup seem able to split existing partitions, I used a third-party tool (GPARTED live CD) to chisel off 2GB of the unused space on the XP partition, to be used for Windows 98.

My question is this: Windows 98 SE's installer seems hell-bent on wiping the entire hard drive and all partitions before installing. I can't point it at the perfectly-good 2gb partition set aside for it; it insists that it wants the whole 40GB hard drive to partition as it sees fit. I've booted into DOS and used FDISK to make sure the 2gb partition was set as active, is shown as a DOS partition, still no luck. I'm using a Win98 OEM ISO that I burnt to a CD, since I don't have a floppy drive to boot the ThinkPad from and the OEM ISO is the only bootable one I'm told.

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong? 20 years ago I would have been able to do this no problem. My brain's just fuzzy on pre-UEFI boot volume limitations these days.

[dr_st]

The partition has to be FAT or FAT32, and it has to be a primary partition. I do not know whether the location of the partition inside the drive matters.

There is a recent discussion of this on VOGONS. Perhaps some tips there will be useful:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=107378

P.S. Welcome to the forum.

[Glaurung-quena]

The partition has to be FAT or FAT32, and it has to be a primary partition. I do not know whether the location of the partition inside the drive matters.

Yeah. My procedure has become:

1. use IBM restore disks.

2. When XP boots for the first time and begins "installing IBM customizations", go into the IBMWORK/DOWORK2 folder, and edit the cmd file that invokes CONVERT.EXE, commenting out the line that starts it. This prevents the drive from being converted to NTFS. The cmd scripts have cryptic names but there's only three of them in the folder, and the one that invokes convert is just four or five lines long.

3. wait for the restore process to finish, then reboot using partition magic or whatever, shrink C:\, and create an extended partition, name it WIN98.

4. reboot into xp, Dump the 98SE install files and drivers onto that partition (D: ) from a thumb drive.

5. make sure there's an MSBATCH.inf in the install folder with the line InstallDir=D:\Windows in the [SETUP] section.

6. boot from a dos disk that can see fat32 partitions (a bootable windows 98se CD rom works). go to D:\WIN98 (or whatever you've named the folder with the 98 install files), run setup.

98SE setup will create the boot menu for you, with a 30 second timeout and 98 as the default choice.

7. now you can add drivers, etc to the new 98SE install, and perform any needed updates/removal of unwanted crap on the XP install.

This works thanks to the rube goldberg method IBM used for restoring from recovery disk (which boots alternately into DOS and XP multiple times as it installs 60 million things). Lenovo only abandoned the DOS phase with the T61 (where you boot into a windows PE command line instead of DOS).

A similar procedure should work on any T4X or older thinkpad, although the location of the cmd file that invokes CONVERT probably varies (I originally found the file by shutting down before the first XP boot, removing the disk and plugging it into another computer, and running a search).

[Gonzaleitor]

I'm trying to do the exact same thing as you. I have a refurbished T42 that I reinstalled the factory XP image with all the IBM goodies, now I'm trying to install 98SE on it in a dual boot configuration.

Since neither XP nor Win98 setup seem able to split existing partitions, I used a third-party tool (GPARTED live CD) to chisel off 2GB of the unused space on the XP partition, to be used for Windows 98.

My question is this: Windows 98 SE's installer seems hell-bent on wiping the entire hard drive and all partitions before installing. I can't point it at the perfectly-good 2gb partition set aside for it; it insists that it wants the whole 40GB hard drive to partition as it sees fit. I've booted into DOS and used FDISK to make sure the 2gb partition was set as active, is shown as a DOS partition, still no luck. I'm using a Win98 OEM ISO that I burnt to a CD, since I don't have a floppy drive to boot the ThinkPad from and the OEM ISO is the only bootable one I'm told.

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong? 20 years ago I would have been able to do this no problem. My brain's just fuzzy on pre-UEFI boot volume limitations these days.

You have to install W98 first creating the partition of the size you want for it(use fdisk), it's the easiest way. Then install XP and it will automatically create a OS selection Screen.

[Glaurung-quena]

I'm trying to do the exact same thing as you. I have a refurbished T42 that I reinstalled the factory XP image with all the IBM goodies, now I'm trying to install 98SE on it in a dual boot configuration.

Since neither XP nor Win98 setup seem able to split existing partitions, I used a third-party tool (GPARTED live CD) to chisel off 2GB of the unused space on the XP partition, to be used for Windows 98.

My question is this: Windows 98 SE's installer seems hell-bent on wiping the entire hard drive and all partitions before installing. I can't point it at the perfectly-good 2gb partition set aside for it; it insists that it wants the whole 40GB hard drive to partition as it sees fit. I've booted into DOS and used FDISK to make sure the 2gb partition was set as active, is shown as a DOS partition, still no luck. I'm using a Win98 OEM ISO that I burnt to a CD, since I don't have a floppy drive to boot the ThinkPad from and the OEM ISO is the only bootable one I'm told.

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong? 20 years ago I would have been able to do this no problem. My brain's just fuzzy on pre-UEFI boot volume limitations these days.

Boot to the DOS prompt, then copy the Win 98 setup files (the folder containing setup.exe and a bunch of *.cab files) to a folder on the disk you've created. Run setup.exe from that folder, and you bypass it trying to run fdisk. It also speeds up the setup process considerably.

[Mr tom]

Back in the days(™) i did a lot of multi boot installs, it was kind of a competition to get as many OSs as possible on one drive,
until stuff like e.g. Plop bootmanager came out.
If you are willing to install plop on the HDD, you can hide the existing installs from the one you are currently installing,
and use the plop bootmenu for all.
Keep in mind older OSes have limitations regarding disk and partition size, ofc position of partition for desired OS install must be within these boundaries.
Plops ability to hide partitions of other installs will also prevent attempts to wipe, or better limit it to the area(s) visible for current OS install routine.

Regarding "...shrinking C and creating an extended D partition for 98se did not disrupt the hidden restore partition or the ability to access it with f11 ..."
TPs of that time had their recovery partition located at the physical end of the drive, in a partition called HPA aka Host Protected Area
which is made unavailable for non linux OS by "set max adress" aka "cut drive" etc command,
although the recovery HPA is kinda hybrid, depending on its setting the partition can be read.

Btw some of the recovery bloatware can not be 100% removed,
my recommendation is to unpack the recovery img(s), identify the undesired stuff, outcomment it in the install scripts and bake changes into a new img.