Error Message when loading 98SE Operating System

[benlomand]

I have a Thinkpad 2883ELU R51 that came with 1.6GHZ Processor 512Ram and WinXP Pro. This one laptop, I need to load 98SE in order to run a single program. After formatting and loading OS I get a message: "Insufficient Memory to initialize windows" " Quit one or more memory resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your Config.sys and autoexec.bat files and restart computer". Can anyone please tell me what I can do in order to load and use the 98SE OS? thanks for any help.

[alexanrs]

I'd start by disabling any unecessary onboard stuff... 512mb shouldn't be giving you headaches...

[benlomand]

I have a Thinkpad 2883ELU R51 that came with 1.6GHZ Processor 512Ram and WinXP Pro. This one laptop, I need to load 98SE in order to run a single program. After formatting and loading OS I get a message: "Insufficient Memory to initialize windows" " Quit one or more memory resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your Config.sys and autoexec.bat files and restart computer". Can anyone please tell me what I can do in order to load and use the 98SE OS? thanks for any help.

I don't know what you mean? Hardware stuff? I have nothing, not even a mouse plugged in. If you mean software, there is nothing. I just formatted HD and loaded OS. When I boot up the error message above is what comes up. I cannot do anything else. Thanks

[jaclaz]

Don't want to put you down , but installing 98 on newish hardware may be tricky.

Interesting to do and you will probably learn a lot of interesting things while atttempting to do so, but it depends on what you need it for.

I mean, if you really need 98 to run natively (for example for directly piloting something attached to a RS232 or something like it, you have no other choices.

But if everything you need is just to run a program that needs 98 to run, a better (in the sense of faster to to set up) solution may be a VM (Virtual Machine) like VirtualBox:

http://www.virtualbox.org/

See this and see if the solutions proposed apply to you:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q253912

http://help.wugnet.com/windows2/Hard-Drive...pict492185.html

If not, first thing to try is to boot in plain DOS, then try WIN.COM with some parameters:

http://www.mdgx.com/msdos.htm

(edit MSDOS.SYS to "remain" in DOS)

http://www.mdgx.com/secrets.htm#WIN

http://www.mdgx.com/newtip10.htm#WINSWITCH

Also, booting in safe mode might give you some different results and possibly a hint about what needs to be fixed.

jaclaz

[Multibooter]

Don't want to put you down , but installing 98 on newish hardware may be tricky.

ebay didn't come up with anything useful for the search string "thinkpad R51 98", so probably this laptop is not compatible with Win98. I remember getting the same error message when I tried to install Win98 on a new Quad Core desktop, which the ebay seller had advertised as compatible with Win98. I returned it after fiddling around with it for a day. Edited November 20, 2008 by Multibooter

[jaclaz]

Hmmm, according to the IBM support page:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss...ocid=MIGR-55029

the R51 appears to be "born" for 2K/Xp/Vista, but there seems to be some 98 drivers:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss...mp;machineind=0

jaclaz

[Multibooter]

but there seems to be some 98 drivers

Very good research jaclaz Interesting case. The download page of the chipset driver http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss...ocid=MIGR-50636 says Win98, but then a footnote to all the models, dated March 8, 2005, says: "(*1) Only Microsoft Windows 2000/XP are supported". I would give it a try according to step 4/4B in ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/oss305ww.txt Maybe it works and IBM just didn't want to support an opsys which it had not pre-installed.