Since Sunday I've been attempting to install Windows 98 SE for the first time in Workstation 14 Pro and I keep running into the same strange problem that I haven't heard of anyone else having and have found no information neither in the VMware community nor elsewhere online about it whatsoever (I'm currently on my eleventh attempt I believe). My memory setting is 256 MB of RAM and the virtual hard disk is 8 GB (IDE), I have tried installing this with a CD-ROM bootable ISO as well as a CD-ROM ISO with a boot floppy image. As far as going through formatting the disk, going through the first part of setup, picking out components to install, entering names and product key, etc, that all goes fine. But then I reach the point where it says, "Setting up hardware: Windows 98 is now setting up your hardware and any Plug and Play devices you may have..." At this point I'm supposed to have the date & time settings come up, but instead I get two error messages:
And here's the "Explorer" error message with details:
Clicking Close and OK on both of them doesn't do any good as the operating system just sits there and when I restart the vm the same kind of messages bombard the entire installation process, doing a second restart will get me to the login window but when I hit Cancel the same messages come back up and Windows will not start up, so my vm is basically a brick.
Now I have no clue what I'm doing wrong here, because I have watched several Youtube tutorials and have re-watched them several times following their similar if not exact steps and I have done thorough research to see if anyone else has ever had this problem and as to what exactly causes this problem and have found less than relevant results.I have tried numerous methods, including:
Running hardware compatibility for VMWare Workstation (I set it to Workstation 6.5-7 in my last attempt)
Setting USB compatibility to 1.1 in vm settings
Splitting the virtual hard disk into multiple files
Reducing the hard disk size to 2 GB
Adjusting the RAM
Using a different ISO from a different source
And I STILL get the EXACT same error messages in the EXACT same point during the installation process.
I'll list the specs of my PC so that hopefully it may help someone here point out the culprit of this problem:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus AX370 Gaming K5
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 Eight-Core Processor 3.00 GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
SSD: Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250 GB
HDD: Seagate Barracuda SD2000DM006 2 TB
External Hard Drive (Back-up): Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8 TB (USB 3.0)
Graphics Card: ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Host Operating System: Windows 10 Pro x64 Version 1709 (Build 16299.125)
Two-Monitor Setup: Both are ASUS VS248 Resolution is 1920x1080
Speakers: Bose Companion 5 USB 2.0
Keyboard: Logitech USB 2.0
Mouse: Microsoft USB 2.0
I know some of these specs aren't necessary to list but I did anyway just in case they may be behind the culprit of the problem.
This is not only really irritating me because I feel that I'm the only one having this problem, but it also really baffles me because there are no videos on Youtube or elsewhere (that I'm currently aware of) that have ANY evidence of the same issue that I'm having and in some of my attempts, I've had my vm settings set to the EXACT same specs as the video tutorial on Youtube and I have problems while the installations in the tutorial videos are uneventful. And I was really looking forward to getting this running and installing Plus! on it and recreating the themes for my Windows 7 vm. Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks.