Windows 9x on ASRock A785GM-LE

[Tommy]

There is no ENUM under CurrentControlSet, there is one directly under HKEY_L_M though. Once backed up, should I attempt to reinstall Windows 98 with this or should I wait?

Edit: Nope, it's not under either of those. Just what I listed here.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Tommy

[dencorso]

You now should have a .reg file (which is readable text), with the full contents of ENUM. That should be a handy reference. Save away a copy of system.dat, too, just in case. Then, if you can, save an image of full ME instalation (at least a partition image). Then proceed with the 98SE install and, before the first reboot, add the VCache.VxD modified by Xeno86 to C:\WINDOW\SYSTEM\VMM32\). Take care to avoid letting the machine reboot by all means before adding Xeno86's VCache.VxD. Then reboot the machine: it should go straight to the desktop and at least start detecting the hardware. Good luck!

[Tommy]

Grrr, I'm still having problems, even after following these instructions and installing Xeno's patch. I've been doing quite a bit of reading and this thread sounds interesting: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/142936-unusual-memory-issue-solved/

With my configuration, would I be wise to go ahead and follow your instructions in it or would it basically be a bit of a waste or does not apply to me? No matter what I seem to do, when I go to reboot in normal mode, the screen goes black and when I hit a key, the Windows 98 logo comes back up, frozen. There are no error messages that I know of. Does this honestly sound like a memory problem? All other new computers I've tried this to with exactly 1GB of RAM does this. It's very confusing indeed because Safe Mode works totally fine and dandy. So what possibly gives? I know in Safe Mode Windows 98 recognizes all 1024MBs of RAM and limiting it doesn't do a dang thing.

Edit: Somehow I was lucky and managed to get an error message by quickly hitting escape to hide the splash screen. It said "Error initializing CONFIGMG, you'll need to restart your computer". Does this help out at all?

Edited March 6, 2014 by Tommy

[dencorso]

Can you reduce the RAM to 512 MiB just for installation or is all your RAM a single stick?

Since you've got exactly 1 GiB of RAM and have added Xeno86's Vcache.VxD, Usher's method should make no difference for you.

What are the contents of your config.sys and autoexec.bat? Do you have a system.cb? What are its contents, if so?

Also bear in mind that you cannot use anything higher than MaxPhysPage=40000 (since 40000 means 1024 MiB), else you'd be telling windows to use RAM that isn't there.

[Tommy]

Sorry, I can't reduce it. My smallest stick is 1GB, I have nothing lower than that.

Before I get to that, I got a blue screen this time, probably because I didn't hammer the esc key. It said "A fatal exception OE error has happened at 0028: 65007004" =/

Autoexec.bat is empty.

Config.sys

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\setver.exe
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.EXE /NUMHANDLES=64 (Only because I already started following your instructions on the last page I linked to)

system.cb

[Keyboard]
layout=kbdus.kbd

[boot]
*DisplayFallback=0

MaxPhysPage was set to 40000, I set it to 20000, made no difference at all.

[Tommy]

I just thought of something...possibly big, maybe not. I had an old Gigabyte board in this case that housed a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor in it along with 1GB (2x512MB) of RAM and I had Windows 98 on it, and it worked just fine without me ever having to do anything to it. Does it make a difference if there's just one stick of 1GB of RAM or 2 512MB sticks? But I never did anything but install it and hope for the best, and it was actually a pretty stable machine.

[rloew]

Try the Free Demo of my RAM Limitation Patch with the /M Option and see if it makes any difference.

[Tommy]

Nope, same results. Just a really stupid question to make sure I'm doing it right, you do it in Windows, right? Or do you do it via DOS? I did it in Windows safe mode via command.com.

[dencorso]

Sorry, I can't reduce it. My smallest stick is 1GB, I have nothing lower than that.

[...]

MaxPhysPage was set to 40000, I set it to 20000, made no difference at all.

Well, I really wouldn't expect MaxPhysPage to work any miracle in your case, but it had to be tried, anyway.

Please double-check that the onboard video is fully disabled.

Try the Free Demo of my RAM Limitation Patch with the /M Option and see if it makes any difference.

Yeah. The above was going to be my next suggestion... Please do it.

@RLoew: welcome onboard! This sure is a difficult case...

[Tommy]

Sorry, I can't reduce it. My smallest stick is 1GB, I have nothing lower than that.

[...]

MaxPhysPage was set to 40000, I set it to 20000, made no difference at all.

Well, I really wouldn't expect MaxPhysPage to work any miracle in your case, but it had to be tried, anyway.

Please double-check that the onboard video is fully disabled.

Try the Free Demo of my RAM Limitation Patch with the /M Option and see if it makes any difference.

Yeah. The above was going to be my next suggestion... Please do it.

@RLoew: welcome onboard! This sure is a difficult case...

It's an AMI bios which I'm really not the fondest of to begin with but that's a bit beside the point. There's not really a way to disable onboard video (that I can see) but the primary video adapter is set to PCI, which is definitely what I have in there, a PCI card (not express).

As I stated above, the RAM patch didn't work either, it still does this funky turn the monitor off thing but pressing a key will bring it back up to a froze 98 logo.

[dencorso]

It might not have worked right during the patching phase... You should be able to install RLoew's patch from DOS. Check whether you do have a C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.BAK... If so, from plain true DOS (not a DOS box inside windows) rename C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.VxD to VMM32.NOT, then rename C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.BAK to VMM32.VxD, then deltree the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32 subdirectory, then create a new, empty, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32 subdirectory, then run RLoew's patcher with the /M option. Cross your fingers, take a long breath, and reboot.

[Tommy]

It might not have worked right during the patching phase... You should be able to install RLoew's patch from DOS. Check whether you do have a C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.BAK... If so, from plain true DOS (not a DOS box inside windows) rename C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.VxD to VMM32.NOT, then rename C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.BAK to VMM32.VxD, then deltree the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32 subdirectory, then create a new, empty, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32 subdirectory, then run RLoew's patcher with the /M option. Cross your fingers, take a long breath, and reboot.

Nope, we have even more problems now. I did all this and now Windows complains about a few files in the system.ini file that are missing (one I remember is IOS.vxd) from the VMM32 directory and then I get an insufficient memory error and when I press any key, the machine just shuts off completely. Maybe I didn't take a long enough breath.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Tommy

[dencorso]

My bad. Sorry! I should have suggested you rename the vmm32 folder instead of deltreeing it.

No matter. At this point the only thing to do would be to start from scratch, once again.

This time, however, prepare a pendrive or diskette to boot DOS from, and boot plain true DOS instead of letting it reboot into windows, like it would want.

Then apply the RMA lomitation patch from DOS with the /M command-line option. Then reboot it once again, and let it go on to the second phase of windows installation.

[rloew]

My Patch does install properly from Safe-Mode.

If it says it's installed, it's done.

Removing it only requires rerunning the Command and getting no errors.

[Tommy]

I am beyond happy right now!! IT WORKS!!! But not this solution.

So before I get to the actual solution, I will say that I did originally try to install the RAM patch from DOS before the second bootup. Strangely enough though, it kept spitting out the error saying "Unknown VMM32.vxd" It was something to that effect but there was a bit more to it. Complexed by both that and the fact of my other 98 Machine running just fine with no errors with a gig of RAM, I remembered something I picked up online last night while I was nosing around.

I figured there HAD to be something else going on but I wasn't quite sure what it was. Then I remembered something about ACPI (I hope I have that right! lol) It was related to the power settings. I completely disabled it as best I could in the BIOS and when I booted the computer, I started in safe mode. I went into the device manager and removed the ACPI driver and the one that controls its IRQ (From what I can tell) and rebooted in normal mode.

That did it!! It was ACPI all along. It went on to the 3rd part of setup and completed successfully. Sad thing is, I'm not 100% out of the woods yet as it doesn't seem to detect much of my hardware so what I'm thinking about doing at this stage is extracting the Windows Me drivers and updating some of the critical system drivers with it and see if it'll detect more. I don't care at this point if it breaks anything as I know what to do.

If this tip isn't in the important Windows 98 threads, maybe it should be as this could be a big help to some people like myself because all my other computers that were around that time also acted in a similar fashion, it just didn't want to go onto the third part of setup. But I remember one time when it didn't install drivers for some reason in the second part of setup, the third part came up and finished, but I can't remember if the desktop ever came up or not or if something else was wrong. Wait...I take that back. I think it found all the drivers when the desktop came up, restarted, and then it started doing its thing. But for now, we have a desktop in normal mode, it boots up just fine.

This is NOT the end though, I will definitely report back each time I try to do something and how far I can get it and exactly how functional I can get it. Thanks for all your help up to this point!

Edited March 6, 2014 by Tommy