I picked up a copy of Win 98 and I'm beginning the installation process now. I'm a Mac person and I usually limit my interaction with Windows, but I need to install it now for a few applications. I'm not sure how important each of the specific settings are, but is there a general 'howto' for this process in regard to installing under Parallels? I know for example, that the installer asks me if I would like to use the "large disk" installation, but I don't know if that makes sense for my situation. Any tips are appreciated. Also, I will only be using Windows 98 for one application. I need to run the Windows version of Quickbooks.
I have Win98se running successfully in build 1920 of Parallels. Here is a "how to" that I put together for another forum I frequent. I don't think I mentioned the "Large disk" option, but I said "yes", since that's a fail safe answer and you are likely to need more than the half gigabyte limit required to use the Small Disk format. Hope this helps ... Configure a new Virtual Machine To create a new virtual machine select File/New window, and click New VM in the bottom left. Follow the wizard and tell it you want a Windows VM with the version of Windows you have an installer for. Let it create a new directory. Make sure it's configured to use your optical drive. Click the link to CD/DVD-ROM 1 and make sure it's Enabled, and set to Connect at startup. The VM will have a default setup with 256 MBytes of RAM and 8 GBytes of your hard drive earmarked. Install Windows Insert your Windows installer CD. Click the green arrow to "power up" your new Windows machine. It should start the normal installation process for your version of Windows, formatting its "hard drive" (slightly scary, but it's not affecting any of your Mac's data.). Since you will need to interact with the installer, this is the time to learn about "capturing" and "releasing"the keyboard and mouse. When you Click inside the window area of the virual machine your mouse and keyboard become attached to it and you can click buttons and type into text boxes on the virtual machine's screen. To release the mouse and keyboard you press Control-Alt (you can alter this hot key combination if you wish, but this is the default). During my installation of Windows 98 the Windows system rebooted several times. Each time, the virtual machine crashed . However, by persistently restarting it I was able to get through the installation. I don't know whether this was due to Windows 98, or my Mac Pro, or an error on my part. YMMV. Eventually you should reach a Windows desktop, probably in a 640 x 480 window. Now you need to introduce Windows to the hardware it's running in so that it can use more screen pixels and colors, hook up to your ethernet interface to talk to your Mac, and work better with your mouse and keyboard. Install Parallels Tools While the VM is running, select the VM/Install Parallels Tools… menu option to install the magic drivers that will connect Windows to your Mac's bits and pieces. This will launch Windows own hardware driver install wizard to do the work, and at the end Windows should prompt you to reboot to activate the new drivers. You should then have a high res screen image, and better control all round. I recommend making a backup copy of the VM at each major milestone for ease of rolling back to a known state as you try new things. It's a folder in ~/Library/Parallels containing the .pvs file that contains the config, and a .hdd file that is the machine's disk drive image.
While installing Win98SE, my mouse (a really old Kensington Orbit) would not respond when I clicked in the VM window until I plugged it directly into a USB port on my iMac rather than into my keyboard. The install seems to be progressing ok now. May be a unique problem to my mouse but worth mentioning if it will save someone else some frustrating hours!
