Win98/ME not booting \ VOGONS

Win98/ME not booting

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First post, by adama

Posted on 2019-11-22, 02:42

adama Offline

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Hey guys, not a problem per se, but more looking for an explanation of an issue i was having that seems to have resolved itself.

I got an EP-MVP3G2 earlier today, and fitted it with an AMD K6-3 that I rescued from an old Cobalt RAQ4i. After eventually finding RAM it liked, I tried to install Win98.

I found an old drive, wiped the partitions, created a FAT partition, formatted it, installed, at first boot it just sits at the end of the BIOS output, doing nothing. Same with a second drive. Now, I think these had both been running either FreeBSD or Win2k previously, so "an" issue is obvious...

After a while of reinstalling, lightning struck, and I booted with the win98 boot cd and ran "fdisk /mbr". But it didn't work! It just stopped at the end, right where you'd expect the loading message to appear.

So as a final try, I burned a FreeDOS 1.2 CD, and installed that (running FreeDOS's fdisk /mbr at the end of the install). FreeDOS booted!

So I booted the Win98SE CD again, formatted C: and reinstalled. It booted!

Why? Is the FreeDOS fdisk doing something the Win98SE fdisk didn't?

It's been a good 15 or so years since I installed Win98SE, so I had forgotten about the tricks like using fdisk /mbr (and using a linux distro to create a quick FAT32 filesystem!), but certainly back then I never had freedos, so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

Reply 1 of 5, by Warlord

Posted on 2019-11-22, 17:54

Warlord Offline

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fdisk /mbr from 98se didn't truely fix the problem but the MBR was always your problem.

Reply 2 of 5, by adama

Posted on 2019-11-22, 18:29

adama Offline

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Indeed, I sort of still suspected that, but I'm not sure why it didn't fix it. I certainly never had fdisk /mbr not work in ye olden days, and I basically wasted my teens flipping between BSD, Linux and Windows, so lots of opportunities!

Is it perchance because the drive is >4GB? (it's a 130GB deskstar clipped to 32GB).

Reply 3 of 5, by jaZz_KCS

Posted on 2019-11-22, 18:37

jaZz_KCS Offline

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Generally speaking, compatibility is highest when initializing / creating partitions and file systems on the machine in question / the machine that is going to use them. Some (inexplicable) problems just vanish when retrying on the target machine. Especially when breaking barriers like the 4 and 8GB ones. Maybe you have not yet updated the mbr after installing the HDD / creating all partitions. You may have dragged along a partially errornous mbr with you for a longer time. In any case I tend to get the highest success rates when creating FAT32 partitions on the target machines themselves.

Reply 4 of 5, by Cobra42898

Posted on 2019-11-22, 18:40

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any chance you forgot to mark the main partition active?

Searching for Epson Actiontower 3000 486 PC.

Reply 5 of 5, by adama

Posted on 2019-11-26, 00:43

adama Offline

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No, I checked that a few times. I set it active when I made the partition in DOS, and then again when I re-created and formatted the partition with Linux for the later install attempt.

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