Win 98 HD on XP comp

Before I try this...

I have a Win 98 HD I'd like to plug into an XP computer as a second disk. Is there anything I should worry about in advance or need to do? So far when I've plugged in an extra disk, Explorer simply recognizes it and assigns it a new letter, but I've never tried something this old.

The Win 98 HD uses an IDE cable, has an extra slot for a 10-hole cable and uses the 4-prong power cable. The XP HD is SATA but also uses a 4-prong power cable.

Would there be any problem with the speeds of the two HDs not matching?

 

Greetings, Norgates.

If your motherboard supports both IDE and SATA then you should be fine. Doesn't matter what OS is contained on the drive - you might ensure that the IDE drive is jumpered to 'slave' to prevent the machine from attempting to boot to that drive.

Plug everything in and boot to your machine's BIOS - if the drive is recognized properly there then you should be good to go.

As far as drive platter speed, there shouldn't be a problem. For the most part IDE drives are either 5400rpm or 7200rpm - for data storage you're not going to see a huge difference.

 

When I first read your post I assumed you wanted a dual boot, which would be possible. However if you just want it for additional storage then you might want to reformat it first to NTFS as it is currently formatted FAT32

 

I don't know if the comp would be able to boot up using the Win98 OS, because it belonged to an OEM computer originally and it is likely to complain at the hardware changes. If I wanted to try it, would I just disconnect the XP HD, plug it in and see what the comp makes of it? I'm guessing, among other things, it would balk at the higher level of RAM at the least.

 

I wouldn't care to guess at what problems you might run into, though hardware drivers are a certainty. The thing is it isn't going to harm anything so nowt to lose so yes, initially just put it in in place of XP and see what happens. I like to keep 98SE in a VM on my Win 7/8 machine and on the odd occasion I boot it I'm always impressed by its speed and capabilities, even in a VM.