First post, by MrD
I have a WIndows 98 Pentium 4 machine with an SB Live! SB0100 PCI installed.
My intention is to dual boot with Win 98 and Win 98's own MS-DOS (for FAT32 support) by using a modified bootable Win 98 rescue floppy disk. I've made the disk, and edited its autoexec.bat and config.sys so it doesn't have the Win 98 tools but follows a typical MS-DOS 6.22 boot sequence: the memory manager, mscdex, mouse.com, sbeinit.com (for SB16 support in DOS games), and doskey. So far, it's working - when I want to play DOS games with the SB0100's soundfont MPU-401 support, I put the disk in (as if I'd installed DOS to the floppy disk) and I get FAT32 support.
(The reason I did this was because I didn't want any Win 98 strangeness lingering when doing sbeinit, which I assumed was kind of fragile and memory intensive, so I've decided to not use Win 98's own 'restart in dos mode' option.)
I noticed that Win 98 itself was running Scandisk every time I restarted the computer without my boot floppy inserted. I put it down to Win98 being weird - I had been installing and removing a lot of drivers, and moved my PCI cards around a few times.
However, after playing Quake like this on the SB0100 to test the CD input, I noticed that my filesystem was acting very strange - directories with nothing in and garbled names, etc. I figured it could be a virus or more likely just the 40gb hard drive's age (from 1998). After trying a few more games, Win 98 proper is refusing to boot, so obviously something is wrong here. I've memtested frequently, ran it for an hour after every PCI card swap, just in case - the memory is fine.
When I use this boot floppy, I'm treating the computer as if it were a MS-DOS 6.22 machine - making sure I'm back to the command line, waiting for any visible activity to finish, then hard powering off. Is it safe to do that with Win98's DOS when using a rescue disk to boot from? My guess is that the rescue disk's version of Win98's DOS has set up caching or something that I'm wrecking by hard powering off? (I saw something like that in the boot of an unmodified rescue disk, but I'm fairly certain I'd removed anything like that though.)