Windows 98 remains a holy grail for retro gamers and tech enthusiasts who want to experience classic PC software natively. While physical hardware from the late 90s is prone to failure, virtualization offers a sustainable alternative. Using the QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write) disk image format paired with QEMU or KVM provides the most flexible, high-performance way to run Windows 98 Second Edition (SE) on modern Linux, Windows, or macOS hosts.
Overwrite or reassign the disk using the Proxmox command-line interface: qm importdisk 101 windows98_full.qcow2 local-lvm Use code with caution. windows 98 qcow2 full
Select , followed by "Start Windows 98 Setup from CD-ROM" . Windows 98 remains a holy grail for retro
When asked about enabling large disk support, type (Yes) to enable FAT32. Select option 1: Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive . Select option 1: Create Primary DOS Partition . When prompted to use the maximum available size, choose Y . Once the operation finishes, press Esc to exit FDISK. Overwrite or reassign the disk using the Proxmox