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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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...

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

> 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-...

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