did You enble it by hand? did you disable/delete/chkdsk and retry? did You scan the entire disk surface? did You get any error messages?

Tmp2k wrote:

I've added the MaxPhysPage line to system.ini to get around the excessive ram, could this have caused it? The system only has 512MB installed at the moment anyway, however without the line Windows fails to boot saying "not enough memory"

You might have better luck with the "MaxFileCache" setting in system.ini, per this Microsoft article, or a combination of the two items.

It should always try to enable a page file unless you've locked it to 0KB (SYSTEM.INI would have MinPagingFileSize and MaxPagingFileSize set to 0).

So a little more info on this.. I've reinstalled Win98 many times and played around with different bits of hardware and this is what I've found...

* Setting MaxPhysPage to values under 40000 disables the pagefile altogether. I thought 20000 would be a good setting as it limits it to 512MB ram. Obviously not.
* For some reason windows does seem to run fine with this setting removed entirely (and 1GB of physical ram installed). This is strange because previously windows failed to boot without this setting in place.
* Either one of the chipset drivers, msconfig, or something else is making changes to MaxPhysPage, as sometimes I find it's changed to a slightly smaller value, 3900 and something.

Here's the big thing though....

* When installing the Intel onboard GFX drivers for the 865G chipset, no matter what setting I have in system.ini the pagefile is always disabled. Remove the drivers, it works fine.

Any ideas???

Now, SURELY you're not still also loading the CD-ROM device driver in CONFIG.SYS (and a redirector like MSCDEX.EXE in AUTOEXEC.BAT), right? It seems like that's not a mistake you would make, from reading your posts in this thread.

Do the hard disk controllers in the Device Manager have the (!) on them? On the "Performance" tab of the System Properties does it say that "Some drives are using MS-DOS compatibility" and "Compatibility-mode paging reduces overall performance"? It's been years since I've dealt with that, so I'm not sure if it deletes the paging file or not.

Or, installing that chipset driver, it can't initialize the driver properly on boot, and is throwing the NOIDE key in the Registry (which I think is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS. Seems familiar).