win 98 help

[Philquad]

im doing a pc for a guy, he uses a cnc? with registered dongle? i read its like a programmable machine of sorts

his problem is his win 98 that works it hasnt got vga right or sumthing
he says he cant get it to work with anything but 98

so i grabbed a 775 with ide out of the spares, im loading win 98 on it, formatting, 12% woooaa
how long will this take? maybe the 250gb hdd was overboard?

& i only put 512 ram in it (ddr2) he says win 98 dont work right with over 512, is that true?

17%

[tristen]

The page at might help.

[Philquad]

thanks tristen
seem to have got thru the format disk part, now its checking system, thats about it
id say its the 775 chipset, only using 512 ram, & ddr does work as i read,

also found, To warn Windows that you have more than 512MB of memory installed, add
the following line to the [VCache] section of your win.ini file:
MaxFileCache = 524288."
from:
( )

[lsemmens]

W98 will work with up to 1Gb RAM IIRC but 512Mb is more than adequate. The 250Gb drive might need to be partitioned to make all of it accessible. As far as slow loading is concerned, are you loading from CD or Floppy? As for slow formatting, FAT32 might be the problem given the size of the drive. Investigate more along those lines might be good.

[Philquad]

update, ddr is ok
yes i found fdisk, wow i forgot that yrs ago
did that, wiped it, verify disk 0% i hit the kill switch
think theres a 10gb in the spares

[SpankedHam]

IIRC the disk driver that came with 98se could only address disks up to 127Gb. Larger disks could be seen but not properly used. Plain 98 had even lower restrictions A Windows update included a driver that supported 48 bit addressing for 98se.

[Philquad]

yep
just for fun, would it work if i made a partition so its not 250gb?
or it still needs to verify disk 1st
in fdisk i only get the 1,2,3 choice, so i 2: wipe it, then 1: made new dos,

wat about if i use xp cd to half the disk 1st, ill try it

[shred]

It should work if you create a small partition on the disk.

Win98 was one of my most hated OSes, although many of the problems at the time were caused by people killing it by getting the free CD off magazines like APC and then installing every piece of garbage software under the Sun. Given the relative fragility of FAT32, it might be an idea to take an image of the disk with something like Ghost (or whatever you have) so you can put it all back together quickly and easily when if the disk directory gets corrupted.

[SpankedHam]

just for fun, would it work if i made a partition so its not 250gb?

That'll work. Same concept, but different underlying reasons, was done for NT 4 (and earlier) too. NT's loader used the old BIOS interface whilst reading in the essentials, and it could only address up to 7Gb into the disk. One had to either create a 7Gb partition and install NT4 there entirely, or create a dinky little partition, put the boot loader and a copy of the disk controller driver named as ntbootdd.sys in there too.

[Philquad]

really
i made it 100
i give up

[shred]

That'll work. Same concept, but different underlying reasons, was done for NT 4 (and earlier) too.

We used to have to do it to work around the 32MB (MB, not GB!) limit in DOS 3.3 so it's a trick that goes back a long time.

[lsemmens]

Ah! Those were the days! I used to write programs on my desktop that I had to take to work to run them as I did not have enough storage or RAM in my machine to load them. (My machine was an XT with twin 360Kb floppies and 256Kb RAM running Dos 2.11. At work, at least, the machines had a 20mb HDD in them.

[mickc]

Good luck with that
You may need to find a older mb or dose the 1 you have drivers for 98?

[SpankedHam]

We used to have to do it to work around the 32MB (MB, not GB!) limit in DOS 3.3 so it's a trick that goes back a long time.

Yeah but that was because FAT16 couldn't handle that amount of storage space (remember diskmanager and it's logical 4k sectors in order to boost the cluster size?) rather than the disk routines not being able to address the disk space.

[Philquad]

got it, used a mates 30gb hdd
it didnt like mine, still, 16 colours, same problem as im trying to help with
off driver hunting

[mickc]

You need 98 mb drivers drivers fist
Remove sound card or disable if onboard start with basics
98 has problems with interrupts and may need to be set manually
Still have some 10g ide drives and possibly vga cards and mbs if you get stuck