ISO Not Booting At All With UEFI Systems and W-ME Not Working On 2008 ThinkPad X61s

[A-WindowsEnThUsIaST-A]

I tried to boot from the USB, but it doesn't work. I tried Rufus, i tried Balena Etcher, i tried Ventoy, but it doesn't work. It just said "UEFI Boot Not Supported. Maybe it was only built for 32-bit system only..".
Also, when i try to flash the USB in Rufus/Balena, it locks it to: FAT, CSM.
Probably it's because I'm using a 2023 ASUS laptop. Just wanted to write just for the developers to know and try to help. It's a great recreation of Windows 98/ME.
BUT i ALSO found another bug.
I tried to install 98QI on my 2008 Think X61s! And here's the thing:
For SOME reason, it only works with W98 and NOT ME.
When i installed it, and booted it a few hrs ago, i instantly get thrown to a BSOD.
BUT, now i get thrown to a blinking cursor. OH MY LORD.
AND, Either Safe/Normal Modes work.
Just writing to address some problems though.
98QI is really a good project, but it has problems. But still, by making these problems visible by bug reports, it may help the developers a lot! :)
Also, here's the file i used for the USB Creation if that helps:
"win98qi_v1.0.1a_ALL_usb.img".

[oerg866]

Yes, the EFI kernel is built for 32-Bit only. I think it may be safe to assume that a UEFI system can cope with 64 bit binaries, so I will make it build for 64 bit instead in the next version.

As for the other problems, the HIMEM patches might fix it, who knows. Other than that, I cannot give support for it. It's simply 9x doing 9x things :)

[44cK3r]

Yes, the EFI kernel is built for 32-Bit only. I think it may be safe to assume that a UEFI system can cope with 64 bit binaries, so I will make it build for 64 bit instead in the next version.

As for the other problems, the HIMEM patches might fix it, who knows. Other than that, I cannot give support for it. It's simply 9x doing 9x things :)

I'm excited for this 64 bit release it might actually be able to boot on one of my laptops that I want it on

(it's a nightmare of a thing it demands UEFI and a heap of other more "modern" crap my goal since I got it is to prove it's own BIOS that it's wrong sadly no success so far but I'll keep trying all the projects I need to to make this happen I've also never managed to install any Windows OS older than XP so this is going to be great! I'm excited!)

[A-WindowsEnThUsIaST-A]

Yes, the EFI kernel is built for 32-Bit only. I think it may be safe to assume that a UEFI system can cope with 64 bit binaries, so I will make it build for 64 bit instead in the next version.

As for the other problems, the HIMEM patches might fix it, who knows. Other than that, I cannot give support for it. It's simply 9x doing 9x things :)

oh ok! I'll wait until stable comes. :D

[A-WindowsEnThUsIaST-A]

Now this happens on the ThinkPad..

[anhollander516]

I cannot boot the kernel on my ThinkPad T430 with Coreboot+EDK2. Obviously there's no BOOTX64.EFI, so I just called csmwrapx64.efi from the EFI shell manually. That does work, but the kernel itself does not boot, just freezing immediately. I tried using my existing UEFI x86_64 GRUB to boot the kernel; same story there.

I tried adding loglevel=7 as well as earlyprintk=vga and earlyprintk=efi to the kernel command line, and I didn't get any output at all.

Shipping both a 32-bit and a 64-bit kernel definitely seems like the easiest route here.

[oerg866]

Not really, it will only be a 64 bit kernel, because there's to my knowledge practically zero machines that are UEFI and 32-bit only

…

On Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 15:37 Avraham Hollander ***@***.***> wrote: *anhollander516* left a comment (oerg866/win98-quickinstall#139) <#139 (comment)> I cannot boot the kernel on my ThinkPad T430 with Coreboot+EDK2. Obviously there's no BOOTX64.EFI, so I just called csmwrapx64.efi from the EFI shell manually. That does work, but the kernel itself does not boot, just freezing immediately. I tried using my existing UEFI x86_64 GRUB to boot the kernel; same story there. I tried adding loglevel=7 as well as earlyprintk=vga and earlyprintk=efi to the kernel command line, and I didn't get any output at all. Shipping both a 32-bit and a 64-bit kernel definitely seems like the easiest route here. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#139?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAISOPOVAMCTDVTOZIAX2FD47FQBVA5CNFSNUABFM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQXTINRXGA4DEMBXGAY2M4TFMFZW63VHMNXW23LFNZ2KKZLWMVXHJLDGN5XXIZLSL5RWY2LDNM#issuecomment-4670820701>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAISOPI3CHTEQGL366QUG4T47FQBVAVCNFSNUABFKJSXA33TNF2G64TZHM2TQNJZGI4DOMRQHNEXG43VMU5TINBRGYZTEMJXGA22C5QC> . Triage notifications, keep track of coding agent tasks and review pull requests on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS <https://github.com/notifications/mobile/ios/AAISOPKNJZS4TSTYY56OHMD47FQBVA5CNFSNUABFM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQXTINRXGA4DEMBXGAY2M4TFMFZW63VHMNXW23LFNZ2KKZLWMVXHJKTGN5XXIZLSL5UW64Y> and Android <https://github.com/notifications/mobile/android/AAISOPJSDB5CIZDSWA2AP3T47FQBVA5CNFSNUABFM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQXTINRXGA4DEMBXGAY2M4TFMFZW63VHMNXW23LFNZ2KKZLWMVXHJLTGN5XXIZLSL5QW4ZDSN5UWI>. Download it today! You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[anhollander516]

Not really, it will only be a 64 bit kernel, because there's to my
knowledge practically zero machines that are UEFI and 32-bit only
…

That's true, anything that doesn't have CSM isn't gonna have a 32-bit EFI. And if it does have CSM it most certainly can be made to boot the 32-bit kernel.

[LaszloEr]

Not really, it will only be a 64 bit kernel, because there's to my
knowledge practically zero machines that are UEFI and 32-bit only
…

That's true, anything that doesn't have CSM isn't gonna have a 32-bit EFI. And if it does have CSM it most certainly can be made to boot the 32-bit kernel.

An infamous exception are the Baytrail atom devices. But those usually have eMMC storage which I guess won't work with Win9x anyway.

[anhollander516]

Not really, it will only be a 64 bit kernel, because there's to my
knowledge practically zero machines that are UEFI and 32-bit only
…

That's true, anything that doesn't have CSM isn't gonna have a 32-bit EFI. And if it does have CSM it most certainly can be made to boot the 32-bit kernel.

An infamous exception are the Baytrail atom devices. But those usually have eMMC storage which I guess won't work with Win9x anyway.

I actually have one of those, and I was going to say something about them, but decided it wasn't relevant.

Those actually have 64-bit CPUs that can boot and run 64-bit Linux just fine. 32-bit UEFI GRUB specifically is capable of doing this. I think it just requires a specific kernel configuration option or two.

The same story on very early Intel Macs. They had 32-bit and 64-bit ones, both using 32-bit EFI. But they do CSM anyways so it doesn't matter.

So yeah, all we'd have to do is ship a 32-bit UEFI GRUB and it'd cover these devices. Unless someone knows of a system that

• has a 32-bit CPU
• has 32-bit EFI
• does not have CSM

then we do not need a 32-bit EFI-enabled kernel.

[A-WindowsEnThUsIaST-A]

Yeah, sadly i have a Class 3 UEFI System, so i can't enable CSM. Probably it's BECAUSE Intel disabled VBIOS so i have to wait for the 64b release. But a weird thing is, that The X61s, that is a Barely Class 0 UEFI (CSM-native) and sstill crashes with and without that non PnP setting.