Thank you so much for the kind words, and thank you for watching! Honestly, I’m going to keep trying at it. I’ve been slowly working on some of the roadblocks I hit and it’s getting there. I recall reading years ago on a random website about a gentleman who ran XP on an SiS496/497 board with a Pentium Overdrive downclocked to 8MHz. Ridiculous stuff!
1. You dont need any cd rom drive.Just copy whole cd to hdd. Then boot and run "i386\winnt32.exe" from Dos. 2. You could use "Lite" Xp versions( some piracy editions) like microxp(83mb). These could speed up your process time.
Hey, thanks for watching and thanks for these suggestions! Truthfully, this is where I hit an impasse, because I was using OnTrack drive overlay and, apparently, the way that handles partitions messed with my ability to read the CF card in a PC! I do think Lite XP versions are an interesting alternative and hey, 83mb is a pretty sweet and small install! I'll have to see what's out there, but thank you for this and thank you for your support!
This is so fascinating. Even if you couldn't get it working I still think it's amazing that it even started installing! Hopefully you can eventually get something going. I wish I knew how to help, I'll do some reading up and see if I can find any other useful information.
Hey, thanks a ton man! It really means a lot! I’m sure we’ll get there for sure! I want to make this a (hopefully not too) long-running community endeavor! We can do it for sure! Let me know if you find anything for sure! I’ll keep you all posted on my end too! Hopefully, we’ll see XP on a 486 in no time! I’m sure of it!
Fun fact: ESD bags are NOT insulators. They are designed to safely (so, slowly) allow charge differences to equalize. I don't think it will matter though as it's designed to slowly dissipate ESD, which can be thousands of volts, and the operating voltages here are 5, 3.3, and 12V
Huh, that’s pretty cool! I had no idea, but that makes a lot of sense! I just put it under the board since I wanted to keep it all together, but good to know! Thanks for explaining!
Thanks for watching! And oh yeah, it's definitely quite cool! The AMI WinBIOS was so poorly received and I'm not quite sure why. It wasn't really any slower than an AWARD BIOS, and it was pretty user-friendly. The later WinBIOSes on the Socket 7 boards are even better, and it's quite impressive how far they went with these. I'm genuinely curious as to whether this inspired UEFI BIOSes in some way--it's certainly, like you said, a prototypical version!
Step one: dont use CF-IDE as it prevents any other IDE unit to be used properly. Only the CD-ROM drive works somehow. No IDE-HDD's of any kind on either primary or secondary ports. Try to use some contemporary HDD's!
One thing to try that I haven't seen suggested: try installing Windows XP on a Pentium 1 board with all the same hardware (same video card, same ide controller, same CF adapter and all that stuff). Then, once you get it actually booting to the desktop, swap out the Pentium 1 motherboard for the 486 one and see what happens.
I really like this idea! I think there’s a lot of earlier Pentium boards that wouldn’t be too bad to do this with. I do plan on revisiting this project and revisiting it soon; it seems as if the XP kernel is limited to the POD on Socket 3, but that’s not to say that there’s other versions of XP that aren’t limited-if we’re talking Whistler haha
Thank you for this video. It's always tricky to install an os on something that isn't supported. Let's hope some people can help you with this project.
Thank you, much appreciated! It was definitely a learning process and, even if it just doesn’t work in the end, I think it’s worth a shot! After all, I think we all can figure out something to get it going!
Cool video my dude. How about copying the XP CD to the CF card and installing from there? Also, are you installing XP pro? I would look for a slimmer version of XP. My first try would definitely be XP Home, but there is a "Starter Edition" that could be light enough.
Thanks a million man! I really appreciate the help too! I think you're onto something with a lighter version of XP. I'll have to try XP Home or Starter! Do you have any experience with any embedded versions of Windows? Maybe that would work out pretty well? I was actually having issues copying the CD over to the CF card because I was using a drive overlay to get it running. When I'd install the overlay, Windows 10 couldn't see the SD card or CF card. Maybe using something SCSI-based would bypass that issue? I have a few SCSI HDDs around that should be up to the task, and I could connect them to one of my other computers externally and copy the files over.
@@RetroTechBytes yeah I was just going to say, transfer the files in a modern computer. Besides home and starter you can find versions of XP that were custom streamlined to be lighter, I used that back when I did tech support. Back then I got it from some torrent website. Oh as for embedded versions, I have no xp 😁👍 good luck, keep it up, can't wait for video 2/2
@@SUCRA That makes sense to me! And LOL YES! I guess we’ll all XPerience it together! (Is that too cheesy?) Either way, thank you man! I will keep you all posted! I’m going to have to do some more tinkering, so my next video is something different for now, but definitely just as special, that I can promise!
@@RetroTechBytes Great video! Just to throw in 2 cents as well a drive overlay is powerful but might be causing some issues. There are ways to format a card on a modern computer to be directly bootable prepared with the Win 98 DOS boot files. At least that way you could get in there and install direct from the card. As for avoiding the drive overlay on at least one machine I had to pop the adapter in a more modern computer to get the sector/cylinder information lined up. After that when I input that manually it was then able to get going. Not sure if that's directly applicable here but just things to keep in your back pocket. Good luck and keep at it!
@@RiksRandomRetro Thank you so much for the input! Now this is interesting. I definitely could get the CF card prepped on my main PC and make it bootable, that makes sense. I know you can launch the Windows XP install from DOS by using WINNT.exe in the i386 folder, so that's definitely a great option for sure. Interesting to hear about the drive overlay too! Did you use anything in particular to line up the sector/cylinder information? The Award BIOS on the LS486E is pretty easy to setup for HDDs once they're prepped like that, so I definitely could do that. But hey, yeah, thank you! This definitely helps a ton! Another step closer!
if it's going to install, I'd recommend adding large disk support for drive's over the 512mb_mark. due to 486 build's being stuck with a limitation. you have to manually add support for disk_size greater than 2gb.... otherwise, there may be other limitation's that impeed "windows xp x86" from install.
Great work! Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. Can I suggest increasing the memory if that's an option and/or using a faster 486 processor? Wish you good luck with this project.
Ohhh such a shame I don't have a P24 to do any test myself and the Cyrix and AMD chips that I have lack the required instructions... What about installing Win98/2000 and then upgrading to XP? I suppose you are using Windows XP sans SP1 / SP2 have your tried any of these newer ones? Don't you have any of these fancy SATA RAM drives to speed up the installation?
You know, that gives me a great idea! Maybe it's worth testing on a larger scale and using the 6x86, since it doesn't support CX8 either! Maybe that could serve as a microcosm for the bigger picture here with a 486? And I am! That was the original XP RTM. Do you think it'd be worth considering the newer releases? I was worried about bloat, but that's a thought perhaps if anything changed in the kernel at some point. Actually that's a good idea too! I could use a SATA PCI card and SSD, and that might be a bit quicker, even with the drive overlay.
all the virtual memory errors you have are because you are using a SD and XP tends to take that SD as a removable storage, hence you cannot set the pagefile.sys in a removable storage. Its not a fault of the 486 / POD, i happened to me in a k6-2 500 and via mvp3.
Great video ! I think VLB isn't actually chipset related. When they say "closely tied to the 486's bus", I think they mean the 32-bit CPU bus ... Which the 386 also seems to have since I saw many 386-486 motherboards and they often offer vlb. I've also seen 386 chipsets being used on 486s by many brands. To me they use the same bus (maybe it's possible to make a 386 to 486 adapter board ??). The pentium introduced 64 bit bus so I think that's why vlb had problems on this platform and didn't make it. For XP's installation, I think XP actually had floppy disks to install it didn't it ? I managed to get windows 2000 to install on my vlb 486 and I think that's how I got it to boot from CD.
Thank you! VLB is weird for sure, and I think that you’re right about that. I should’ve been a bit more clear. The biggest reason I had for calling it a “chipset feature” is more or less that it’s been implemented in some weird ways, like on the NexGen 5x86s, or even on the IBM 486SLC2, which actually uses the 16-bit data path that VLB offers. Truthfully, I’ve never much understood why VLB is also able of 16-bit reads/writes, when ISA is pretty much able to do the same. I guess bus speed? But you’re absolutely correct and that’s a great point. The Pentium’s early chipsets that offered VLB were really weird because, like you said, the Pentium had a 64-bit external bus for DMA transfers, and those chipsets used 32-bits of the data path for VLB and 32-bits for memory, which was awful (and yet I’d love to find one, because what’s cooler than a Pentium with VLB! LOL)! And actually, that’s a great idea. I didn’t think of that at ALL! XP does indeed have boot floppies and they’re out there for sure. I’ll have to check it out. Thank you for the idea! I’m adding it to the list of things to try!
Thanks for watching, and thank you for the support! Yeah, it definitely does just BARELY meet the minimum. I’m beginning to suspect it might’ve been something to do with L2 cache on that board. I’m considering trying again, bar L2, and seeing where things lie. 128MB is pretty awful though. I tried it on a PIII 600MHz and the 128MB was still bad enough that disk-swapping made it all but un-usable. I suppose the key here is that it’s XP on a 486 main board/system, so it’s kinda going to be awful anyway hahaha! Either way, thank you for watching!
As mentioned, XP wont allow a pagefile to be used on a compact flash disk, I had the same issue on my pentium 3 system when I installed one… switch to an IDE HDD and you’ll fix this issue.
Copy the install files to a folder on a second disk, yes second disk cause you want to format the first one to NTFS, then boot from a floppy go to the second disk and start the installer.
Used a 83mhz Pentium Overdrive on a Lucky Star LS-486E with 128megs to install and run XP on the same PCI-mainboard able to hold 486s, but the setup as well as bootloader will lock up on anything older than a pentium if you swap 'em out 🥴 oh well that was a nice experiment (older whistler builds closer to win2k will likely work but nah I'm done)
But in our 486 it would not boot, it only has 16MB of ram, and it does not accept more so not by chance What I would give to see in our IBM Windows XP, of course if the ME was dragging just to start I do not want to imagine with this, and the 98 directly does not start, it makes a pretense of starting but it does not start, it only does it with the failsafe mode
Been trying but 486s don't boot from CD and the FLP image doesn't have a DOS-compatible setup :( so maybe upgrading from 95/98/me or finding another way to get it installed could work. I'm still trying :)
Great! loved that video. Hopefully you will manage it. I need to try it as well. 😍
Thank you so much for the kind words, and thank you for watching! Honestly, I’m going to keep trying at it. I’ve been slowly working on some of the roadblocks I hit and it’s getting there. I recall reading years ago on a random website about a gentleman who ran XP on an SiS496/497 board with a Pentium Overdrive downclocked to 8MHz. Ridiculous stuff!
1. You dont need any cd rom drive.Just copy whole cd to hdd. Then boot and run "i386\winnt32.exe" from Dos.
2. You could use "Lite" Xp versions( some piracy editions) like microxp(83mb).
These could speed up your process time.
Hey, thanks for watching and thanks for these suggestions! Truthfully, this is where I hit an impasse, because I was using OnTrack drive overlay and, apparently, the way that handles partitions messed with my ability to read the CF card in a PC! I do think Lite XP versions are an interesting alternative and hey, 83mb is a pretty sweet and small install! I'll have to see what's out there, but thank you for this and thank you for your support!
This is so fascinating. Even if you couldn't get it working I still think it's amazing that it even started installing! Hopefully you can eventually get something going. I wish I knew how to help, I'll do some reading up and see if I can find any other useful information.
Hey, thanks a ton man! It really means a lot! I’m sure we’ll get there for sure! I want to make this a (hopefully not too) long-running community endeavor! We can do it for sure! Let me know if you find anything for sure! I’ll keep you all posted on my end too! Hopefully, we’ll see XP on a 486 in no time! I’m sure of it!
Fun fact: ESD bags are NOT insulators. They are designed to safely (so, slowly) allow charge differences to equalize. I don't think it will matter though as it's designed to slowly dissipate ESD, which can be thousands of volts, and the operating voltages here are 5, 3.3, and 12V
Huh, that’s pretty cool! I had no idea, but that makes a lot of sense! I just put it under the board since I wanted to keep it all together, but good to know! Thanks for explaining!
Ami WinBios was brilliant i never understood why all bios didn't go this way, it was like uefi bios but 30 years ago.
Thanks for watching! And oh yeah, it's definitely quite cool! The AMI WinBIOS was so poorly received and I'm not quite sure why. It wasn't really any slower than an AWARD BIOS, and it was pretty user-friendly. The later WinBIOSes on the Socket 7 boards are even better, and it's quite impressive how far they went with these. I'm genuinely curious as to whether this inspired UEFI BIOSes in some way--it's certainly, like you said, a prototypical version!
Step one: dont use CF-IDE as it prevents any other IDE unit to be used properly. Only the CD-ROM drive works somehow. No IDE-HDD's of any kind on either primary or secondary ports. Try to use some contemporary HDD's!
One thing to try that I haven't seen suggested: try installing Windows XP on a Pentium 1 board with all the same hardware (same video card, same ide controller, same CF adapter and all that stuff). Then, once you get it actually booting to the desktop, swap out the Pentium 1 motherboard for the 486 one and see what happens.
I really like this idea! I think there’s a lot of earlier Pentium boards that wouldn’t be too bad to do this with. I do plan on revisiting this project and revisiting it soon; it seems as if the XP kernel is limited to the POD on Socket 3, but that’s not to say that there’s other versions of XP that aren’t limited-if we’re talking Whistler haha
Thank you for this video. It's always tricky to install an os on something that isn't supported. Let's hope some people can help you with this project.
Thank you, much appreciated! It was definitely a learning process and, even if it just doesn’t work in the end, I think it’s worth a shot! After all, I think we all can figure out something to get it going!
Amazing build, don't give up you can do it, you can install that Windows XP 😉 Experience will not be awful, it will be crazy.
Thank you! I'm all about the crazy! I think this 486 system might cry along the way though haha
@@RetroTechBytes Remember when you see Intel cpu - no mercy for them during testing ha ha
Very true haha! Gotta be sure to do some thorough tests!
Cool video my dude. How about copying the XP CD to the CF card and installing from there? Also, are you installing XP pro? I would look for a slimmer version of XP. My first try would definitely be XP Home, but there is a "Starter Edition" that could be light enough.
Thanks a million man! I really appreciate the help too! I think you're onto something with a lighter version of XP. I'll have to try XP Home or Starter! Do you have any experience with any embedded versions of Windows? Maybe that would work out pretty well? I was actually having issues copying the CD over to the CF card because I was using a drive overlay to get it running. When I'd install the overlay, Windows 10 couldn't see the SD card or CF card. Maybe using something SCSI-based would bypass that issue? I have a few SCSI HDDs around that should be up to the task, and I could connect them to one of my other computers externally and copy the files over.
@@RetroTechBytes yeah I was just going to say, transfer the files in a modern computer. Besides home and starter you can find versions of XP that were custom streamlined to be lighter, I used that back when I did tech support. Back then I got it from some torrent website. Oh as for embedded versions, I have no xp 😁👍 good luck, keep it up, can't wait for video 2/2
@@SUCRA That makes sense to me! And LOL YES! I guess we’ll all XPerience it together! (Is that too cheesy?) Either way, thank you man! I will keep you all posted! I’m going to have to do some more tinkering, so my next video is something different for now, but definitely just as special, that I can promise!
@@RetroTechBytes Great video! Just to throw in 2 cents as well a drive overlay is powerful but might be causing some issues. There are ways to format a card on a modern computer to be directly bootable prepared with the Win 98 DOS boot files. At least that way you could get in there and install direct from the card.
As for avoiding the drive overlay on at least one machine I had to pop the adapter in a more modern computer to get the sector/cylinder information lined up. After that when I input that manually it was then able to get going. Not sure if that's directly applicable here but just things to keep in your back pocket. Good luck and keep at it!
@@RiksRandomRetro Thank you so much for the input! Now this is interesting. I definitely could get the CF card prepped on my main PC and make it bootable, that makes sense. I know you can launch the Windows XP install from DOS by using WINNT.exe in the i386 folder, so that's definitely a great option for sure.
Interesting to hear about the drive overlay too! Did you use anything in particular to line up the sector/cylinder information? The Award BIOS on the LS486E is pretty easy to setup for HDDs once they're prepped like that, so I definitely could do that. But hey, yeah, thank you! This definitely helps a ton! Another step closer!
Definitely trying this myself!! Can't be more frustrating than the current project.
Hey, I’m all for it! Your current project is quite exciting though! Installing XP at a snail’s pace is more agonizing than anything haha
the main thing is not to give up and everything will be fine I believe in you that you will succeed:)
Thanks a million! I really appreciate it! It definitely can be done, and I know that we--the larger community--can get this done together!
@@RetroTechBytes it seems like before the launch there is a check of the hardware configuration and perhaps because of this it can be not working
That makes a lot of sense! I wonder what’s missing. Perhaps it’s something BIOS related?
@@RetroTechBytes That's where I can't help it it's just my theory
@@RetroTechBytes I recommend reading on the forums there are enough such topics
if it's going to install, I'd recommend adding large disk support for drive's over the 512mb_mark. due to 486 build's being stuck with a limitation. you have to manually add support for disk_size greater than 2gb.... otherwise, there may be other limitation's that impeed "windows xp x86" from install.
Great work! Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. Can I suggest increasing the memory if that's an option and/or using a faster 486 processor? Wish you good luck with this project.
Ohhh such a shame I don't have a P24 to do any test myself and the Cyrix and AMD chips that I have lack the required instructions...
What about installing Win98/2000 and then upgrading to XP?
I suppose you are using Windows XP sans SP1 / SP2 have your tried any of these newer ones?
Don't you have any of these fancy SATA RAM drives to speed up the installation?
You know, that gives me a great idea! Maybe it's worth testing on a larger scale and using the 6x86, since it doesn't support CX8 either! Maybe that could serve as a microcosm for the bigger picture here with a 486?
And I am! That was the original XP RTM. Do you think it'd be worth considering the newer releases? I was worried about bloat, but that's a thought perhaps if anything changed in the kernel at some point. Actually that's a good idea too! I could use a SATA PCI card and SSD, and that might be a bit quicker, even with the drive overlay.
Underrated
all the virtual memory errors you have are because you are using a SD and XP tends to take that SD as a removable storage, hence you cannot set the pagefile.sys in a removable storage. Its not a fault of the 486 / POD, i happened to me in a k6-2 500 and via mvp3.
SD or CF, its the same problem
Thanks for the heads up! I'll keep this in mind for round 2, which should be coming around soon! :)
Great video !
I think VLB isn't actually chipset related. When they say "closely tied to the 486's bus", I think they mean the 32-bit CPU bus ... Which the 386 also seems to have since I saw many 386-486 motherboards and they often offer vlb. I've also seen 386 chipsets being used on 486s by many brands. To me they use the same bus (maybe it's possible to make a 386 to 486 adapter board ??). The pentium introduced 64 bit bus so I think that's why vlb had problems on this platform and didn't make it.
For XP's installation, I think XP actually had floppy disks to install it didn't it ?
I managed to get windows 2000 to install on my vlb 486 and I think that's how I got it to boot from CD.
Thank you! VLB is weird for sure, and I think that you’re right about that. I should’ve been a bit more clear. The biggest reason I had for calling it a “chipset feature” is more or less that it’s been implemented in some weird ways, like on the NexGen 5x86s, or even on the IBM 486SLC2, which actually uses the 16-bit data path that VLB offers. Truthfully, I’ve never much understood why VLB is also able of 16-bit reads/writes, when ISA is pretty much able to do the same. I guess bus speed? But you’re absolutely correct and that’s a great point. The Pentium’s early chipsets that offered VLB were really weird because, like you said, the Pentium had a 64-bit external bus for DMA transfers, and those chipsets used 32-bits of the data path for VLB and 32-bits for memory, which was awful (and yet I’d love to find one, because what’s cooler than a Pentium with VLB! LOL)!
And actually, that’s a great idea. I didn’t think of that at ALL! XP does indeed have boot floppies and they’re out there for sure. I’ll have to check it out. Thank you for the idea! I’m adding it to the list of things to try!
NT 4.0 would be a better operating system to run 486.
Dont worry bout the size of the disks. You have a network card with 28/32 pin eprom slot. Just burn a copy of XT-IDE on a 27C256 and call it done.
I want one of those 83mhz pentium overdrives but I went with an overdrive dx4-100 due to price new is way less than used Pentium
I did the same thing back then and regretted it . I should have gone with the pentium overdrive .
A clickable bios in 1995 ? Wow, i didn't know such thing existed.
Just looked up the requirements, and the RAM should meet the minimum - lowest I've seen it running on is 256MB though, and that was painful
Thanks for watching, and thank you for the support! Yeah, it definitely does just BARELY meet the minimum. I’m beginning to suspect it might’ve been something to do with L2 cache on that board. I’m considering trying again, bar L2, and seeing where things lie. 128MB is pretty awful though. I tried it on a PIII 600MHz and the 128MB was still bad enough that disk-swapping made it all but un-usable. I suppose the key here is that it’s XP on a 486 main board/system, so it’s kinda going to be awful anyway hahaha! Either way, thank you for watching!
I guess that QDI V4P895GRN/SMT didn't cut it so you went with the lucky star ls-486e
As mentioned, XP wont allow a pagefile to be used on a compact flash disk, I had the same issue on my pentium 3 system when I installed one… switch to an IDE HDD and you’ll fix this issue.
Copy the install files to a folder on a second disk, yes second disk cause you want to format the first one to NTFS, then boot from a floppy go to the second disk and start the installer.
And I would go back to VLB
it is impossible. I tried to install winxp on some motherboards but there is fatal hang was during preparation of winnt cache folder.
Used a 83mhz Pentium Overdrive on a Lucky Star LS-486E with 128megs to install and run XP on the same PCI-mainboard able to hold 486s, but the setup as well as bootloader will lock up on anything older than a pentium if you swap 'em out 🥴 oh well that was a nice experiment
(older whistler builds closer to win2k will likely work but nah I'm done)
But in our 486 it would not boot, it only has 16MB of ram, and it does not accept more so not by chance
What I would give to see in our IBM Windows XP, of course if the ME was dragging just to start I do not want to imagine with this, and the 98 directly does not start, it makes a pretense of starting but it does not start, it only does it with the failsafe mode
Great👍
I would install win xp on a drive on faster CPU and then just let 486 system to boot up from it
XP wont install on removable drives. You need to use an SSD or HDD.
but you need a Intel overdrive i486
Try Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (FLP)
Been trying but 486s don't boot from CD and the FLP image doesn't have a DOS-compatible setup :( so maybe upgrading from 95/98/me or finding another way to get it installed could work. I'm still trying :)
Use a real hard disk. Those cf cards aren't seen as a fixed disk.
Install on another machine and move it over.