One of my customers has a legacy client/
server accounting application whose
desktop client runs only on Windows 98.
Although the accounting application pales
in comparison to today’s full-featured ERP
suites, it has a capable server-side database
engine and it meets the company’s
needs.
For the past two years, I’ve helped
the company keep its accounting application
in production by migrating the
Win98 desktop to Microsoft Virtual PC
2007 on Windows XP Professional hosts. If
you’ve performed physical to virtual (P2V)
migrations, you’re probably aware of the
challenges associated with them. Each migration
seems to have its own personality
and associated obstacles to
overcome. In the Win98 P2V
migrations, the obstacle was
getting the mouse integration
feature to work.
Mouse integration lets
you seamlessly move the
mouse pointer between
the virtual machine (VM)
window and the host’s
desktop. If you don’t have
mouse integration, you must hold down
the keyboard’s right Alt key to get the
mouse to move outside of the VM. This is
rather bothersome if you use the VM like a
program window.
To get the mouse integration feature,
you need to install Virtual PC 2007’s Virtual
Machine Additions in your VM after the VM
is up and running. Mouse integration has
always worked for me for every Windows
OS running in Virtual PC 2007, except
Win98. It even had worked in my own
Win98 VM until I uninstalled and reinstalled
Virtual Machine Additions while doing
some diagnostic work. (I personally have a
Win98 VM for those occasional Symantec
pcAnywhere support sessions or Win98-
only classic games.) Since then, I spent
hours uninstalling and reinstalling Virtual
Machine Additions and
looking for the reason
why mouse integration
didn’t work, but to no
avail. I even discussed
the problem with Microsoft
Customer Service
and Support (CSS) and
a Microsoft product
manager. In both cases,
the reply was something
to the effect of, “Win98
is no longer a supported OS…but mouse
integration works for us.”
Recently, the same customer asked me
to do another Win98 P2V migration. To my
complete astonishment, after installing Virtual
Machine Additions, mouse integration
worked on the VM. Now I had something to
work with for comparative purposes.
The details of the comparative diagnosis
are long and boring, so I’ll spare you
the minutiae and get right to the solution.
The code that makes mouse integration
work is in the VM’s C:\Windows\system
.ini file. Apparently, a bug in the Virtual
Machine Additions installation routine
sometimes rears its ugly head when the
code is installed into Win98 VMs. To fix the
bug, you can use Notepad or edit.com to
edit the system.ini file’s [boot.description]
and [boot] sections. Here are the edits you
might need to make:
• If the line
mouse.drv=hostmaus.drv
is in the [boot.description] section, move
it to the [boot] section.
• If the line
HOST.MOUSE.DRV=Microsoft Mouse
is in the [boot.description] section, delete
it. Add the line
HOST.MOUSE.DRV=mouse.drv
to the [boot] section.
• If the line
mouse.drv=Standard Mouse
is missing in the [boot.description] section,
add it.
Note that you need to
enter these lines exactly
as shown. In addition,
don’t change any of the
other lines in the [boot] and
[boot.description] sections.
I entered a line incorrectly
at one point in my testing.
As a result, when Win98
started to boot, it hung
with an error report of
“…Windows 98 could not
start. Please reinstall Windows….” To fix
the problem, I had to use edit.com from
DOS to open the system.ini file and make
a correction. Afterward, Win98 booted
without any problems.
Before you edit the system.ini file, I
recommend that you back up the system
.ini file. That way, if needed, you can restore
the .ini file in its original condition from
a Win98 DOS prompt (i.e., press F8 when
Win98 starts to boot and select option 5,
“Command Line”).
End of Article
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