Windows 98 installion problem-scandisk

[tsudrummer24]

Because I have an ext3-formatted partition on my hard drive, windows 98 installation initiates Scandisk. This would be fine, only that my hard drive is from a modern computer and 92GB. As you can imagine, this would take a day or more with Scandisk's speed.

Is there any way to disable this?

[Constance]

Perhaps using a boot manager so that the ext3 partition is hidden to Windows 98 ... however it seems strange to me that Windows 98 would run scandisk on a partition it can't even manage ... are you sure the issue is really related ?

[tsudrummer24]

Do you know of any boot managers that can do this? All I'm familiar with is GRUB.

I'm not sure if it's related, but in qemu, it doesnt use scandisk.

[Constance]

You can give a try to XOSL, I installed it at my work and it works just fine.
I'd recommend installing it on a dedicated FreeDOS partition (you won't need more than a few megs)

[tsudrummer24]

I attempted to install FreeDOS, and it installed onto the FAT32 partion quite well, but when I booted to it, it gave an error message that said

bad or missing command interpreter.
enter the full shell command line.

And thus, I could not install XOSL.

Any other ideas?

[Constance]

Well, was command.com present on your partition ?

[tsudrummer24]

sadly, i'm not sure. I gave up too early, and just switched to virtualbox.

MUCH better than qemu...I would definitely recommend it to you- it's cross-platform and open-source.

It seems like we're the only ones using this forum, doesn't it?

[Constance]

Yep, looks like there aren't many people around lately ^^'
However I don't really see the point between those virtualisation solutions and boot managers (?)

[tsudrummer24]

I don't understand your (question).

You mean you don't understand my desire for windows 98? Or you don't see vm programs a viable solutions, or vice versa?

[Constance]

I just thought you believed you could actually make a real dual boot using a virtual machine ^^'