What if you disconnect the floppy drive from your mainboard?
My first assumption would be drive-related failure if My Computer hangs. Maybe it's not the drive itself but the cable (hope not the controller).

I just checked and currently the floppy drive is already disconnected

Another thing that happens and I forgot to mention, is that for some reason Windows 98 boots one time, then the next boot crashes with STACK error, then the next time boots again and so on, weird

Then I'd try a different hard drive. My second guess would be either faulty RAM or failing HDD considering the difficulties of installing and running Windows. Or indeed drive controller.

I'm trying different floppy drives and they all give me Error 40, so weird

I just ordered an SD to IDE adapter, we'll see tomorrow if it'll work

Elia1995 wrote on 2022-05-17, 08:24:

I'm trying different floppy drives and they all give me Error 40, so weird

Is it set up right in BIOS? Isn't it set to 1.2MB instead of 1.44MB or the other way around?

There really aren't all that many things that can result in error 40.
1. The drive is faulty
2. The cable is faulty
3. The cable is connected the wrong way
4. The drive is misconfigured in BIOS
5. Your floppy controller

Yeah, in the end I'm keeping it disabled, won't need floppies anyways if I put the files directly on the SD card from my main PC

Here's a bit of heads up on the things!

The adapters arrived today and I'm currently still testing stuff out, I ordered an SD to IDE and a SATA to IDE adapters.

The SD to IDE makes the computer hang after POST, when it should automatically detect the C/H/S of the drive; I tried different cards but same thing.
I just tried that adapter on another PC (an IBM Pentium 100) and it works perfectly, Windows 98 which is installed there, detects the SD card as a second hardisk and shows me all the ~119 GB (I formatted the SD card as FAT32 using Rufus, making it bootable with FreeDOS, to proceed and install Windows on itself on the Pentium 2 PC)

The SATA to IDE works fine, tho if I use a SATA III SSD I ordered along with the adapters, it freezes the PC when it should auto detect the C/H/S, similarly to what the SD card does (but that SD card works on an even older PC!)... I tried another SATA drive and it gets detected perfectly, it even detects the Samsung SSD 750 EVO which I've been using in my main PC, so I'm now backing its data up and will try to proceed and install 98 on it (partitioning it because it's 250 GB, so I'll make a smaller, 120ish GB partition for it)

I have had similar issues with enabling DMA on certain drives. I have a socket 7 board that just doesn't like certain hard drives. It took me some time to figure out the proper combination of drives so that I could enable DMA without lock ups.
I suspect it is a buggy IDE controller.

I had a computer acting up like this and it was related to a usb mass storage device and nusb. It was ok if I removed the device.

I installed Windows 98SE on the SSD and it bsodded when I plugged in the flashdrive after installing the required USB drivers I got from Phil's website.
So I then installed Windows ME and so far it's working nicely, tho I haven't plugged in any USB drive in it..... After all, since I'm now using a SATA drive, I don't even need to do that, I can just plug the SSD back into my main PC and transfer files directly...

Probably I'll roll back to 98SE on that SSD and transfer files directly like that, if I feel that 98SE is any way better than ME.

The Pentium 2 is truly bottlenecking that SSD tho, the installation of the system didn't take much shorter than on the SCSI drive I was previously using!
I might get a smaller SSD and use it there in the future, and move this one to a better machine, I wanna experiment on the Sempron and Palomino builds

Well...Usb mass storage support in windows 98 is experimental at best. Maybe some chipsets are incompatible. Maybe try an older version of nusb?

Not sure how you connect your sad but have you activated DMA?

Alright, after successfully installing Windows 98 SE on the SSD, it seems that something weird happened to the system, it works fine, no problems at all, the only thing is that all of a sudden in the system info it shows up as "Windows ME" and instead of "Intel Pentium II" I have a "x86 Family 6 Model 3 Stepping 4" CPU, other than that weird glitch, everything works perfectly fine tho...

I wonder wtf is that?

Joakim wrote on 2022-05-20, 18:12:

Well...Usb mass storage support in windows 98 is experimental at best. Maybe some chipsets are incompatible. Maybe try an older version of nusb?

Not sure how you connect your sad but have you activated DMA?

And yes, I enabled DMA

Did you install any of the non-micosoft service packs?Some of them use files from ME and sometimes that info screen shows ME instead of 98se.

(Edit: fixed spelling)

The windows me bug is related to nusb. There is a forum post somewhere on how change it back to windows 98. Or you can install an earlier version of nusb that does not have this problem.

If it involves reinstalling Windows 98SE again, I'll pass, everything's working fine after all, it's just an aesthetic thing

Likewise the gradients on the title bars somehow stopped showing up too, now they're flat blue colors, despite the fact that I have the 3dfx drivers installed and I have the colors set to 32 bit, it seems the gradient disappeared along when the ME bug arrived, so it might be related, or maybe just a coincidence

If I remember correctly it was a regedit key that needed modification. Not overly complicated but I was not convinced it is limited to this text string so I went the long route and reinstalled and went back a version on nusb.

As someone explained nusb is somehow extracted from Windows Me.

And what about it not recognizing the CPU as a Pentium 2 anymore, but x86 family something?

I think you have a virus (called Windows Me). 😉

Joakim wrote on 2022-06-11, 09:12:

I think you have a virus (called Windows Me). 😉

😱😱😱