Windows 98SE is not installable in VirtualBox 6.1.2 with a Ryzen 3000 CPU

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Steps to reproduce:

1) Create a new VM called Windows 98 - everything by default, RAM 64MB, HDD 2GB 2) Attach win98se.iso 3) Install it (enable large disk support, use all defaults) Hardware detection finishes successfully, restart.

Now the "Setting up hardware" stage begins and everything breaks at this point.

Explorer: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

I don't know whether it's a regression or not.

I could successfully install VirtualBox 5.x and Intel Core i5 2500 CPU.

Now I have a new VirtualBox and a new CPU, so it's hard to say.

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Installation error

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

VBox.log

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

You can get the installation CD here:

​https://thinfi.com/iz53

Password is PRXXXXX where XXXXX are this ticket number.

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Here's an entire VM which boots into a crash:

​https://thinfi.com/iz5n

The password is the same.

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

What I've found out:

The "Nested pages" option definitely makes the guest crash a lot more than it would without this option.

After enabling IO APIC and disabling "Nested pages" the installation proceeds almost normally, except during the Updating System Settings stage, VirtualBox crashes:

A critical error has occurred while running the virtual machine and the machine execution has been stopped.

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

VirtualBox crash when the guest IO APIC is on and Nested Pages is off

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

I cannot claim it but IO APIC being disabled or/and "Nested pages" being enabled seemingly makes Windows 98 SE work incorrectly in a way that it writes broken files to the disk or executes certain code paths incorrectly.

It's quite surprising though since I was under the impression that IO APIC is required only for SMP machines which this version of Windows doesn't even support.

Also, according to various Internet sources Windows 98 doesn't even support IO APIC in the first place which makes this issue even more mysterious.

Anyways, it's up to you to investigate and solve this bug. Considering Windows 98 SE is a dead unsupported OS I'm not even sure it's worth your efforts but a lot of people will be disappointed.

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Windows ME also produces a gazillion of errors during installation and cannot be really installed as it simply doesn't allow to log in (a lot of files are damaged).