Windows 98 SE install attempt on Thinkpad T410

[David Silaban]

Hi all, this is my first time posting on this forum.

First of all, this laptop has 4GB of RAM installed, finding RAM that are small for this laptop is quite challenging and the smallest I got is 1GB which I will try it when it arrives.

In the meantime, I attempted to install Windows 98 SE on this laptop, the first stage of the install worked with Jemm386, and this goes successfully. However, when I'm going to continue through the second stage installer, which as far as I know is already in Protected Mode and VMM32 is loaded, it starts, although I have to turn off legacy USB boot option in BIOS. After that, the laptop always hangs after idle for about 30 seconds, which I already cannot continue the setup and I have to hard restart this laptop.

 

Any ideas what to fix and what would be the main problem for this issue? Thanks all.

[SweetLow]

2 hours ago, David Silaban said:

Any ideas what to fix and what would be the main problem for this issue?

 

2 hours ago, David Silaban said:

4GB of RAM

 

2 hours ago, David Silaban said:

Jemm386

Use vanilla himem and or limit memory (software, NOT harware) or use RLoew's big memory patch.

[David Silaban]

18 minutes ago, SweetLow said:

 

 

Use vanilla himem and or limit memory (software, NOT harware) or use RLoew's big memory patch.

Thank you for your advice. I tried HIMEMX, MaxPhysPage, RLoew's PATCHMEM but unfortunately all end up in that hang on idle thingy.. 

 

Is this caused by the Disk drivers or did it tries to overwrite the EBDA? I tried to debug with SoftICE but even SoftICE unable to catch the issue

[SweetLow]

35 minutes ago, David Silaban said:

Is this caused by the Disk drivers or did it tries to overwrite the EBDA?

It's uknown now. And what did you mean about "the second stage installer" and "idle for about 30 seconds" simulatneously? Installer definitely does not IDLE, it's installing something.

 

[David Silaban]

53 minutes ago, SweetLow said:

It's uknown now. And what did you mean about "the second stage installer" and "idle for about 30 seconds" simulatneously? Installer definitely does not IDLE, it's installing something.

 

Sorry I meant that at the point when Windows boots for the first time after installation, the system hangs 30 second after Windows finally displays its UI, it hangs like for example when typing the serial number, it can also hang by leaving the laptop doing nothing for 30 seconds.

[SweetLow]

1 hour ago, David Silaban said:

the system hangs 30 second after Windows finally displays its UI

Rare case. It is definitely not the BOOT problem as problems with storage subsystem usually hаve place on earlier stage.

And in such situation I would switch to hardware tests before anything else (memory (RAM) first).

[MERCURY127]

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

[David Silaban]

18 hours ago, SweetLow said:

Rare case. It is definitely not the BOOT problem as problems with storage subsystem usually hаve place on earlier stage.

And in such situation I would switch to hardware tests before anything else (memory (RAM) first).

I tried Memtest86+ v4.00 and it just hangs at the bluescreen with nothing seems to be happening, keyboard does not respond at all. I'm still waiting for my 1GB RAM in mail order to come to see if that will work...

 

12 hours ago, MERCURY127 said:

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

Which patches that are required for this to work? I just tried PATCHMEM and it still hangs at the same place.

[SweetLow]

If it is really RAM problem then try the second path - restricting memory size visible to Windows.

Restrict XMS memory to some value enough to boot Windows. 96 or 128M would be ok.

burnmem, xmsres, limitmem...

[MERCURY127]

4 hours ago, David Silaban said:

Which patches that are required for this to work? I just tried PATCHMEM and it still hangs at the same place.

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...

Edited March 25 by MERCURY127

[SweetLow]

52 minutes ago, MERCURY127 said:

what mean possibility other problems, often completely unexpected

It's all true, but we discuss setup problem as I can understand (means no ACPI, no PM drivers, no Power Management - something like Safe Mode). We literally do not touch any of these problems.

Edited March 25 by SweetLow

[David Silaban]

Thanks for the replies. I have tried burnmem, xmsres, limitmem, all comes to the same system hang problem.

I have also tried lowering the RAM (I got 2GB RAM for now) it still comes to the same problem.

Interestingly I tried using QEMU to try to simulate the modern system using -M q35 option and setting -m to 4G of RAM, the system crashes on the Insufficient memory error, but it is resolved using Rloew's PATCHMEM. The system boots to the enter User Information screen without any hanging whatsoever...

 

I'm guessing there is a problem with the BIOS emulation of the disk driver, the laptop might be crashing on accessing the disk drive (but only on Protected Mode), which is reproducible by pufengdu's trick on changing the ShellName to COMMAND.COM, which loads VMM32 in DOS but does not go to Windows UI. The problem also appeared on this setup, the system suddenly hung up after 30 seconds.

 

Btw, do you know any DOS IDE, SATA or AHCI driver?

[MERCURY127]

19 minutes ago, David Silaban said:

any DOS IDE, SATA or AHCI driver?

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.

Edited March 26 by MERCURY127

[David Silaban]

1 minute ago, MERCURY127 said:

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

The driver is for accessing the internal hard drive without using the BIOS emulation driver, like direct access to it?

[MERCURY127]

26 minutes ago, David Silaban said:

The driver is for accessing the internal hard drive without using the BIOS emulation driver, like direct access to it?

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!

Edited March 26 by MERCURY127