Did you try Windows 3.10, too ? My Contura laptop (486) refuses to work with WfW 3.11.
It hangs after the splash screen when program manager shows up.
Vanilla Windows 3.10 works just fine, however.

Jo22 wrote:

Did you try Windows 3.10, too ? My Contura laptop (486) refuses to work with WfW 3.11.
It hangs after the splash screen when program manager shows up.
Vanilla Windows 3.10 works just fine, however.

I have not tried 3.10 yet, but I will put it on the ToDo. Thanks!
EDIT: Is 3.10 and 3.1 the same thing?

You did not mentioned what kind of display adapter you are using, but this sounds like a dipslay card/Windows display mode incompatibility problem.

I suggest you to run setup, (setup.exe in Windows folder) and choose a compatible display mode like VGA 640*480 with 16 colors. See if it will work. For anything above that, either higher resolution or higher color density, you need to install your display card specific Windows 3.x drivers.

The other thing is, If you have networking installed, WfW 3.11 will not start without a network card connected to a router or switch. If this is the case, try "win /n" to start Windows (which means without networking)

tayyare wrote:

You did not mentioned what kind of display adapter you are using, but this sounds like a dipslay card/Windows display mode incompatibility problem.

I suggest you to run setup, (setup.exe in Windows folder) and choose a compatible display mode like VGA 640*480 with 16 colors. See if it will work. For anything above that, either higher resolution or higher color density, you need to install your display card specific Windows 3.x drivers.

The other thing is, If you have networking installed, WfW 3.11 will not start without a network card connected to a router or switch. If this is the case, try "win /n" to start Windows (which means without networking)

I am using the default VGA driver, but I also tried using the Speedstar 24x driver through setup. I will try some more screenmodes and such.
I mentioned trying WIN /n, but that seemed to make things worse, somehow.

Another idea: Maybe there's an i/o conflict. Some adapters such as video cards and network cards
use the memory region between 640KiB and 1MiB. Windows 3.1x on the other hand, does it as well.
Maybe it helps if you're running MemMaker or if you exclude a certain region in config.sys/EMM386 and system.ini.

strip it back to basics
just the motherboard, minimal ram, standard VGA

remove 1 of the floppy's, soundcard, ontrack so as little as possible can go wrong. you can slowly build the system up part by part and see where it all goes wrong.
You didn't say are you using an actual HDD or some kind of CF or SD adaptor? as these can also do funny things

I've had some luck!
I'm using Philscomputerlabs boot selector, and when I select "Extended" instead of "expanded" memory windows 3.11 starts up just fine! I've tried using memmaker but it makes no difference.

Hello! Same motherboard, same issue. Any solution running Win 3.1 with expanded memory?

cerculdestele wrote on 2020-12-04, 12:20:

Hello! Same motherboard, same issue. Any solution running Win 3.1 with expanded memory?

If you're not running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups , then it's not the same issue as this two-year-old thread, now is it..?

You're also going to have to provide a lot more information.

A year later, I also had the same problem.

IBM Blue Lightning 25/50 PS/1000, 2 Gb SCSI2SD, 64 Mb RAM, AWE32, NIC. I tried to strip it down to the basics, tried different mouse drivers, with RAMBOOST (PC DOS 6.1, gotta stay true to blue 😉 ) without it, off a boot diskette, basic VGA, serial/ps2 mouse, with all cards removed, with all COM and LPT disabled, and then in the middle of it all, my SD card decided it didn't want to live anymore, so bam, had to restart it all on another card. From scratch.

I did replace the RAM, as I have some (possibly EDO) 32 Mb sticks from an IBM POS (K6-2 350 - it could also be FPM) and I replaced those with some slower 4 Mb parity sticks - I did get a little further, but ultimately, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups will install, populate the icons, and restart as normal. When you WIN at the C:\ prompt, it loads Progman and promptly hard-locks. With the 4 Mb sticks I was able to get to the network login prompt, but it hard locked there. I tried all the bypass switches, no go. Just, my PS/1000 doesn't like it.

This may be the solution - It mentions Ambra and Blue Lightning based machines, as well as certain IBMs. NSSI and HWinfo don't recognize the keyboard BIOS, so I'm gonna give this a shot:

Windows 3.1 OK? 3.11 locking up? Here is the fix!

And it worked 😁

I finally figured this one out. The culprit is Ontrack Disk Manager. If you don't use it, Windows 3.1 works like a charm.

cerculdestele wrote on 2022-12-08, 21:18:

I finally figured this one out. The culprit is Ontrack Disk Manager. If you don't use it, Windows 3.1 works like a charm.

Hi there! 🙂 Some of these DDOs (EZ-Drive?) come with a Fastdisk driver for Windows 3.1x.
However, it has an 8GB limit. Just like MS-DOS 6.2x itself.

Using bigger HDDs can cause trouble. Or rather unpredicted results. Depends on the HDD, the BIOS etc. 🤷‍♂️
It can cause address wrap-arounds, corrupted partitions etc.

The only exception, I think, is if DOS is solely using BIOS to query drive information (rather than a DDO) .
In that case, DOS/Windows 3. 1 can be fooled into thinking a smaller HDD is installed.
However, this requires manually entering CHS values in Setup.

Edit: Alternatively, some diagnostic programs can limit the HDD's reported capacity through the HDD firmware.
Phil showed this with Seagate tools in one of his videos, I vaguely remember.
But to the PC's point-of-view, that's rather a hardware solution. The HDD really becomes smaller, after all.

Tip: In System.ini, under [386Enh], adding 32BitDiskAccess=false can disable the Windows HDD driver, if enabled.

If not installed/enabled, the 32BitDiskAccess= entry will make the checkbox in control panel visible, at least.