Project: Installing every beta build of Windows Me in VMware!

[anonymous74]

Here we go again...

I've already done one of these projects on Windows XP, Pre-Reset Longhorn, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, and now I'm going for a slightly older OS. The project is as the title states, I will be attempting to get every single Beta build of Windows Me running inside of VMware virtual machine. I don't count RC (Release Candidate) builds for these projects because they are so similar to the RTM build, I'll just end up getting really bored really quickly. The end goal here is to have every beta build of Windows running in a VM.

Why would I spend the time to do this? What's the point? Fun, of course! Plus, I like seeing the evolution of Windows just as much as the rest of this forum, and sometimes installing and checking out every build is just the best way. What else am I going to use my new 2TB SSD and 4TB HDD for?

Due to how long I tend to take on these projects, and the 30 day edit limit on posts here, I'll be keeping track of my progress on my user page on the BA Wiki as I've done in the past.
Link: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index. ... ildproject

Here's a bit of information on the information I have on the BA Wiki Page:

Information about build interest ratings:
The more interesting a build is, the higher value /10 it gets. The longer it has been since a new interesting feature in a build, the lower score it gets. For me, visual changes make a build more interesting so that is the most important metric in determining this value.

About Screenshots:
In the past, I have linked screenshots of every build I installed with winver or similar open. Since migrating to the BA Wiki for my progress tracker, I still haven't taken the time to figure out how to add a screenshot gallery. I will go back and do this for both my Windows 7 project and this project at some point (I'll be keeping these VMs for as long as I can!), just bear with me for now.

Past Projects:
See my signature below.

Is Windows Me really as bad as people say? I suppose I'll find out!

Wish me luck!

[techLinuxtux]

Damn I haven't been on this forum for a LONG Time and you've got to this! I hope we can get more updates

[anonymous74]

Thanks
I've got 5 of the 20 installed so far. The main struggle is keeping control over the BIOS Date. As soon as you install VMware tools, it time-syncs and boom, timebomb tripped. I found a patch but it causes the build to have the RTM bootscreen, which I don't want, so instead I'm just leaving a boot floppy in the drive so that if I miss F2 to BIOS it won't trip the build. It's working, but I did have to re-install build 2348 some 4 odd times before I figured that trick out.

[LetsLeakOurHardWork]

Okay, this sounds pretty interesting to me. I don't get the point of it, but it's interesting!

[anonymous74]

The point of it is.......why not!

[TechGamer17]

You can disable the VMWare time syncing in the options of the VM I think.

[anonymous74]

I tried a tutorial that gave me lines to add to my vmx file and it corrupted the vm lol. I’ll have to try it again.

[anonymous74]

Ok, bad news for this project. First off, I know it's been slow going. I work on these when I feel like it, as after all, it's just a thing I do for fun. Main issue right now is I managed to break my 4TB hard drive (where all the vmdk files were stored...) by plugging the wrong power supply into it. My only hope of saving this data is for the new controller board I ordered off eBay to arrive and fix it, but I'm not holding out too much hope as of right now. We'll see in early december I guess.

[anonymous74]

controller board didn't fix it, bye bye windows 7 and Me VMDKs...
So, it might be a while before you see me finishing this. I've got to reinstall every single build on those before I continue. real shame

[pinkOCELOT]

bummer... I feel you. What kind of HDD is this? maybe it's just a fuse or a 0ohm resistor that popped somewhere and your drive can be saved. If that won't work I'm sure the platters in the failed drive can be taken out and placed into a donor drive to back up the data. You might need some special tools to keep the heads eparated and you also need to be extremely careful with the alignment of the platters as there's no markings on them at all. It's hard but it can be done, there are videos on YouTube how to do it.

[anonymous74]

bummer... I feel you. What kind of HDD is this? maybe it's just a fuse or a 0ohm resistor that popped somewhere and your drive can be saved. If that won't work I'm sure the platters in the failed drive can be taken out and placed into a donor drive to back up the data. You might need some special tools to keep the heads eparated and you also need to be extremely careful with the alignment of the platters as there's no markings on them at all. It's hard but it can be done, there are videos on YouTube how to do it.

Drive was a LaCie 4TB drive. Inside the enclosure was a 3.5" SATA drive from Seagate. Enclosure works with another drive. Drive does not work with another USB adapter. What really sucks is the wrong PSU I used was the same voltage, connector and polarity. Just an extra amp, which usually wouldn't cause issues but it did here. Nowhere near skilled enough for data recovery myself, and the data lost isn't worth sending the disk off to drivesavers.

I lost my Windows 7 and Me VMs, still have longhorn, vista and XP thankfully. Will finish this, gotta get the rest re-installed first. Will take a bit.

[Luca M.]

Don't give up, man! This is a very interesting project and I for one appreciate your dedication. Good luck!

[anonymous74]

Thanks mate! Will be back to it. Did just check and I lost the last few XP builds too
My guess would be sometime late this year, it's going to take some time to get the Windows 7 and Me VMs that I was up to back. I work on these projects based on my motivation, so yeah, we'll see.

[legacyfan]

hi @anonymous74 great project! ive been watching this recently and decided to join here because of this keep up the good work!

[anonymous74]

Thanks, and welcome! I'm glad that my projects are being enjoyed here

[anonymous74]

Just a quick update here:
I’ve sorted through all of my pre-reset and post-reset longhorn builds now. Unfortunately I found that several post reset builds won’t boot for one reason or another so I’ll have to reinstall them. I also reinstalled two Windows 7 builds, so I’m starting in my way there.
I am happy to say that I’ve gotten some big storage upgrades as well. Everything now will be backed up often to a brand spankin’ new WD 14TB external drive. As for the main storage drive that I use to store in-use files and my local OS and abandonware archive, I’ve got a new WD 5TB portable hard drive on the way! It will be replacing my 2TB Seagate drive (likely based on the rosewood series…). This means that my files will be free from the curses of Seagate at last. So that’s to say that as long as I’m good about backing up, I shouldn’t have any more data loss issues for a very long time.

[anonymous74]

New drive's in. Getting data moved over now! I'm working through reinstalling Windows 7 builds now, then once I'm done with that and any other corrupted builds, I can get back to this project and then finally move on to Windows 8!

[Shintaro1969]

Thanks
As soon as you install VMware tools, it time-syncs and boom, timebomb tripped. I found a patch but it causes the build to have the RTM bootscreen, which I don't want, so instead I'm just leaving a boot floppy in the drive so that if I miss F2 to BIOS it won't trip the build. It's working, but I did have to re-install build 2348 some 4 odd times before I figured that trick out.

Very interesting project.
And very useful for others coming along afterwards and trying to get a Build working for what ever reason.

Some things you might consider doing:

Are you recording the problems with the solutions?
For example:
Build 2419
Installation Notes: A couple of files weren't found, but it still booted.

Questions that I would ask:
- What files? What were their names?
- Could they be found in another CAB (cabinet) file or put in or edit the ISO image to resolve the problem?
- I think there is an installation log, maybe that might help.
- How does the boot log compare to the boot log from the previous build?
- If it does boot, but has missing files, what impact does that have? If the missing files are known, then people can probably work out what services are impacted.
- Was the issue known and fixed in the next Beta?
- Is the issue in a MS KB? What release (month/year) of MSDN CD is the information on?

A lot of information on the architecture of Windows ME should be in the 3rd Ed. of "Inside Windows 2000".

Turning off time sync in VMware
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1189
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMwar ... -p/1806894
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMwar ... -p/1806894

Is there any particular reason for using Vmware? Have you tried 86Box? Especially on the releases that have problems?
That way you can determine if the problem relates to Vmware or virtualization in general. I am pretty sure if it was found to be related to virtualization the people that maintain 86Box would be interested.

With the versions that don't boot or have problems, did you hook up a debugger to look at the output when it boots? I *think* they (BETA's) should have debugging information included.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

Hope this helps in some way.

Cheers,
Craig

[anonymous74]

Not sure I'm the right person for that job... This is mainly a personal project to experience each build and also to have them on hand for the future if I should need one. When there's so many builds to go through overall, digging through KBs and MSDN CDs and analyzing boot logs would make everything take twice as long, and it's already a project that's likely to take at least 5 years if not more. 10 is just unrealistic. I'd lose interest way faster that way as well which would only add to the time.

What I can certainly do is to go into more detail on issues when writing, such as what specific files were missing. Will do that when I run through all the Me builds again. Better leave figuring out what that breaks to more knowledgeable people though.

Re: VMware:
Main thing is that I just love having everything in one place. 86box is on my PC and works better for 9x stuff, but part of the challenge for me here is whether or not I can get a build working under VMware's hypervisor, even if it's going to be more problematic. So far though I haven't run into many vmware specfic issues, just one Me build out of the ones I tried before my hard drive died wouldn't boot. I use VMware in general because it's the most feature rich VM program I've found, better and faster than virtualbox. So easy to organize VMs too, if I had 50+ VMs running on 86box, they'd end up in a giant list of doom. At least on VMware you can sort stuff into subfolders and such.
I mean, here's a peek at my VM list...


Anyways, those are my thoughts.

On the topic of storage upgrades, my transfer finished. everything is backed up, and I have breathing room again for my VMDKs! I can kick things back into high gear now.

[Shintaro1969]

All good.
Any help for other people is always beneficial.
Screenshots of Stop codes (BSODs) and even minidump would be good if possible and if it happens.

Maybe the VMware config files for the VM might be useful or at least if anything has to be changed from the standard.

Vmware has a habit of changing items in their config files for VM's.
Have you noticed that a VM doesn't work when changing between versions of VMware?

Was that VMware Workstation on Windows?

Yep, that's a few VM's there.

[anonymous74]

Yep, good ol' Windows. Haven't ever gone back a version in VMware, currently on version 16 and not too eager to pay to upgrade my license...at least it isn't a subscription service. that's the day that i sail the seven seas. i started with it at version 14 but most of my VMs from that time have been lost because back in 2019(?) i dropped my 1tb drive and lost it all... I may be making it sound like I'm a clumsy barbarian with my storage devices but I swear that those are the only two times I've ever lost data.

[anonymous74]

Alright: All Windows 7 builds have been re-installed! This means that I can finally return to the Me project. Will provide updates as I go.

[Meow]

Main thing is that I just love having everything in one place.

This is why I try to install operating systems in VMware first, as it does get kind of annoying to have to use different applications for the same purpose. Now obviously there are exceptions to that (Mac OS pre 10.4, any non x86 systems, extremely old OSes), but generally I have had no problems running major Windows versions, macOS past 10.4, and various Linux distros under VMware.

Massive data loss does suck though. My old 1TB portable HDD nearly died before I got the 1TB portable SSD I have now. I plug the old HDD in a few days later to move all of my ISOs and VMs over, and it's dead. Thankfully important data got moved over before the drive died, but it was quite a pain to have to re download over 100 GB of ISOs and then re install nearly 35 VMs.

Good luck on your project! Hopefully no more data loss occurs lol

[anonymous74]

Thank you for the words of encouragement! Data loss stinks. Can't say that it wasn't my fault though - I could have backed my 4TB drive up, I had two 2TB drives that I could split a backup between. Was meaning to but never got around to it and that bit me back bad didn't it. I have a much better strategy in place now though, I backed up to my new 14TB drive a couple months ago and will be doing so again soon.

As for the project, I found out that I accidentally forgot to manually change the VMDK save directory to my external hard drive for the first couple of Me builds, so those just went to my documents instead. That means they're saved! I believe I may have installed one of the missing builds as well, but I'm not sure. Will be doing more soon.

I've got QEMU set up for PPC OS X and Classic Mac OS, but it honestly isn't great to use without a VM manager program of some kind. There are a couple for Linux and of course there's the excellent UTM for macOS but nothing for windows unfortunately. I think it's about time I actually learn python and just make one myself haha. Would be really simple, just have to make it translate some drop downs into commands to save to the batch file and that's about it.

[Meow]

I've got QEMU set up for PPC OS X and Classic Mac OS, but it honestly isn't great to use without a VM manager program of some kind. There are a couple for Linux and of course there's the excellent UTM for macOS but nothing for windows unfortunately.

I found QtEmu, which does have a Windows installer. Not sure if it supports PPC QEMU though.