How the hell did we ever put up with Windows 9X?

So, while I was sitting around the house being sick, I had an idea: How much of an insane computer can I make for $100? Basically, I was going to frankenstein a bunch of parts from various past computers, drop $100 on a new motherboard and GPU, and triple boot Ubuntu, TinyXP Rev 10 and Windows 98 SE. Because I wanted to build a legacy rig, it absolutely had to support Windows 98 SE. So, I got my Intel 865 GLC in the mail today, assembled everything in the Thermaltake V3 Black Edition (and I'll probably transfer it to the Armor A90 instead), and went to town. Since I started working on it earlier today, I've managed to install Ubuntu and XP in about 45 minutes combined. I then proceeded to spend 8 hours trying to get Windows 98 SE to work. Every single time the thing restarts it spits out a new, completely unique computer error, and about half of them require a restart.
Obviously the required chipset drivers and stuff need to be installed (I also needed to fiddle with things to drop the RAM down), but it is rather silly that it spits out an error, allows me to restart it so the error goes away, then when I restart it again the same error comes back up, in addition to the new ones that precede.

Basically, I just said screw it and I'm downloading one of those slipstream 98 SE discs as I type this.

You sure there is no hardware problems?

What are the errors?

Yeah. The Windows XP and Ubuntu setups went off without a hitch. And an awful lot of this hardware is being repurposed from prior computers, so I know it has worked in the past.


The very first error was because (stupid me) forgot to adjust the Memory Cache and physical memory settings. Every error after that has been some hardware related thing that says is a problem even though I know it isn't one.

For example, I got the "Please insert the following disk in drive D (or your CD-ROM drive)" error when it started formatting in Windows 98 setup which didn't go away until I reformatted, and then deleted the partition for, the hard drive using the Windows XP installation disc. The most common recurring one was that Windows apparently would not start under any circumstances unless I installed the motherboard chipset drivers (specifically, the "Your multi-function device (Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller) has some child devices using 32-bit drivers and others using computability-mode drivers. This configuration is not supported, so your computer has been halted to prevent corruption." error)... until I restarted the computer and it worked fine.

There are alot more, but those were the most annoying ones.