MERCURY127

try standard HIMEM.SYS with /MACHINE:AT switch...

i use one only "boot manager" — PART, and only in minimal and stupid variant — one sector in MBR. this enough for select bw Win98, XP, 10 or Linux on same disk. 3-4 boot options per disk, switch to next disk, no PLOPS, no GRUBS, no CRABS, no PROBLEMS...

you mean DMA? yes, these exist ONE that driver for relative modern machines (as i think, begin at P2 era) — UDMA/XDMA/UIDE/UHDD/XIDE/XHDD.SYS series, which also is disk cache. http://optimizr.dyndns.org/dos/drivers.html also i remember some "accelerated" drivers for older hardware (MSDOS/Win31 era)... but they is not generic, and in general useless... ordinal SMARTDRV give better effect. last, all used me AHCI hardware and BIOS do HDD access fast enough to not use any other drivers or caches (use SMARTDRV, if you need speed-up random access for find files at all disk). and REMEMBER: SMARTDRV have BUG, affecting on PARTITIONS bigger than 128 GiB (128 *1024 *1024 *1024 bytes) sized!

for what? if you talk about CD/DVD drive — yes, there is VIDECDD.SYS for Legacy IDE (ie "true ISA IDE cntrls at ports below 400h"), UIDE/UDVD/XIDE/XDVD.SYS series for Native SATA mode (aka "non-legacy PCI IDE at ports above 400h"), and AHCI.SYS from Rloew, for AHCI mode.

or we have just buggy/bad code is IDE cntrl BIOS add-on or main bios.

are u try w/o JEMM* ? JEMM* is not compatible with 9x, even if DOS 7 normally work. as i see on google, Thinkpad T410 is too MODERN machine for 9x: - it is ACPI machine with too new ACPI standart version for 9x = many potencial problems with PnP and PCI subsystem of 9x. - have too many RAM, cause many problems, which not fully solved with PATCHMEM (possible bad memory layout). - use SATA or even AHCI mode for disk = need Rloew SATA patches, and AHCI driver (and latest Sweetlow patches for both). - have EHCI mode USB cntrs only = need USB20 stack from ME/2K/XP (and patches by Sweetlow). - have external graphical chip Nvidia Quadro, and there no drivers for 9x, except VBEMP. and also it is NOTEBOOK, what mean possibility other problems, often completely unexpected...

1) jemm* never work with 9x. 2) need full stack Rloew patches.

i mean "without ANY potentially intervening layers between hardware and windows". GRUB does intercept some interrupts and modify some system tables during his work.

are u try install w/o any grabs/crabs/etc?

on my first expirience with 1155 i have long time with 98 install failure, until try ban acpi fully...

try setup /p i

i found likely problem with my experiments on "old pc simulators", when used scsi. not sure, that here is allowed to attach or link "heavy modded io.sys file", but... i can send it you for test to private, if you interested. or, as variant, try install ME.

what disk cntrs mode is selected in BIOS? try set it to any non-RAID option. try disable in BIOS all disk cntrs and other devices, except really needed for boot, which possible.

why even use dpmi for such simple app?

no, no, no! hybrid sys+exe is not just concatenation. when loading exe file via DEVICE= command, DOS wiill skip exe header only, not all body of exe file. u need rewrite source for it.