Given that VirtualBox does not have any supported/provided Guest Additions for Windows 98 (or 95 for that matter), running under VirtualBox is incredibly slow and sluggish. An interesting IE feature that was discontinued from Vista onwards. I remember using this ' active desktop' feature in 98, where you could have web content pinned to your desktop. “Windows 98 supports new, cutting edge technologies” … I’m glad 98 made my computer “more entertaining.” I booted the VM from a floppy disk image (the same I downloaded for my 95 installation attempt, from here), partitioned and formatted the virtual disk, and then ran 'setup' from the CD: There’s a great post here that describes VM specific settings compatible for installing 98 – I went with 1GB RAM and a virtual 10GB disk and followed the other suggested settings. Moving on then, next up, installing Windows 98. More likely, the issue is related to VT-x virtualization (I can’t find the option to turn off VT-x support on my VirtualBox install), or other posts suggest this is most likely to do with host CPUs faster than 2.1GHz, and my Mac Pro has dual 2.8 Xeons.

What on earth Windows 98 was doing back then initializing iOS devices is interesting, but beside the point. This error is described in this KB article, but I’m not sure updating the BIOS in my Quantum hard disk is really applicable in this case. My attempt to install Windows 95 on Virtualbox on my Mac Pro didn’t turn out too well, as by the time the installation completed it refused to boot, with this error: 'While initializing device IOS.

Installing windows on mac virtualbox