Maestro's Windows 2000 extravaganza

so yesterday I decided to spice up my retro build, the Maestro a bit by adding a second more late-90s-esque OS for dualboot. 

initially i tried using Windows 9x Quickinstall and installed Windows 98 SE, but it had a lot of issues. getting sound to work without relying on USB sound card was impossible, GPU driver did not switch b ack to text mode (so DOS mode was out of question, yet now I realize i might have been installing the wrong device the entire time... hm) and Atheros LAN driver of dubious origin was hanging the reboot/shutdown process. Windows Me didn't go far at all, installing graphics drivers immediately rendered it unbootable.

so, what are our options? i already ran Linux and Haiku on this machine, so i kinda couldn't care less about it at this point. well, there's also one more Windows option. Windows XP's forgotten father that came out on the turn of the millenia - Windows 2000. so, decision made - Windows 2000 it is.

i prepped a Windows 98 VM to rip some UI resources from it (mainly Internet Explorer/Outlook Express executables and stuff like shell32.dll and sounds), and burned a disc with Windows 2000. then unplugged the WinXP HDD to avoid Windows 2000 installer screwing it up. booting into it, i realized that Windows 2000 has no quick NTFS format option. and second realization dawned upon me that the image i downloaded and burned was an SP0 image which is a no go. So I took the disc out, sent it to trash and booted a partitioning program while downloading an SP4 ISO and burning it from a different machine. formatted the disk, set it to active and installation went smoothly from there. most drivers i had burned on discs did have Windows 2000 INFs in them, so network and chipset was a breeze. GPU drivers for Win2k were still on Nvidia website, so that was not hard too.

and then the Creative Labs curse striking again. apparently the X-Fi SB0790 driver disk has an installer that is total shit and doesn't work on 2000. so autorun program tells you to scram, your OS is too old bozo. and now the funni: when i dug down to actual drivers folder, it was labelled, you won't believe it, Win2k_XP. they had a Win2k driver, but no Win2k installer. perfect. love you Creative. but, installing the sound driver manually got the sound working, albeit without setup tools, but i decided i'll take it over finessing with a USB audio card dongle tenfold.

then i went ahead too install Legacy Update to install whatever patches available in Win2k archive. it started smoothly, but then i made a grave mistake and plugged the Windows XP hard drive back in before Win2k finished that process. and, of course, Windows 2000 decided to run CHKDSK (Windows NT filesystem scan and repair tool) on it, obliterating the filesystem in process, as it partially changed metadata to an older NTFS version and Windows XP couldn't quite make heads or tails of this NTFS 3.1 and 3.0 mishmash, and couldn't boot. thankfully no data loss occured, and running a Windows XP version of CHKDSK took a while, but ultimately reverted filesystem to working state. 

but otherwise installing Windows 2000 was surprisingly smooth. I then removed the drive letter from a Windows XP partition, so Win2k wouldn't mount it, and gave it some touchups so it more felt like Windows 9x. I will post some screenshots later, but as of now, that's how the Maestro's Win2k journey stands in.