VOGONS


First post, by Good_Punk

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Hello everyone,

I've spent the last two days trying to get Windows98 to run on that Thin Client (which I know is not optimal).
The main issue was that the whole system froze every few seconds for several seconds, which made using it a chore. (Installing Windows98 took about 5 hours)

After I've installed SATA drivers, overwritten the ESDI_506.PDR for larger file support and changing the Drive from IDE to AHCI it gotten a lot better, but I'm still having issues.

Windows at some point showed a blue screen telling me that the 32bit IDE drivers were not working or something and that it would put them in compatibility mode.
And when I open the System Settings performance tab it shows that Drive C is in MS Dos Compatbility. After reading some stuff on the interwebsz Ive deleted the bad_ide and NoIde keys from the registry and added "32BitDiskAccess=ON" to the system.ini.

Unfortunately that didn't seem to do anything. The drive is not showing up in the device manager at all, but I guess that's because it's driven by MS-Dos and not Windows?

I've also tried to install some VIA drivers that somebody used for a different HP Thin Client, but the installer just says "Registry Error - Please Reboot" *shrug*

I don't think the size of the SSD (256gb) is the issue because I had the same problems when I tried to install Windows on the Internal 1gb Flash Drive, but I might be wrong.

Oh and funny thing: The (USB) Mouse doesn't work correctly in Safe-Mode (it's jumping around randomly) and the (USB) Keyboard doesn't work in normal mode (computer freezes when I plug that in).

I'm not sure if what I'm trying to do here is even feasible but I'm thankful for any hints regarding my issues. 😁

Reply 1 of 4, by BinaryDemon

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256gb would be an issue for Win98, do you have it partitioned to <127gb?

Reply 2 of 4, by Good_Punk

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No, I have not, but I've installed the >127gb driver with the ESDI_506.PDR file. As I understood that should work, but if it doesn't I would try a smaller partition.

Reply 3 of 4, by wierd_w

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Try to keep the smaller partition for the boot volume, as this assures that LBA remains in the "Safe" 24bit flavor.

After that, comb the registry and look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Services
\ VxD \ IOS and look for an entry named "NoIDE". Delete it if it is there.

Then, check for "BAD_IDE" from the F3 to search menu. Delete any instances you find. Reboot.
Cross your fingers.

Reply 4 of 4, by Good_Punk

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I've tried that but still got an error message when first booting up Windows98 that one of the child drivers of my IDE driver is in compatbility mode and that thas is not supported so Windows switched the whole driver in compatbility mode or something.

Also I was a bit surprised that changing the drive from IDE to AHCI in bios didn't seem to have any effect.

Also I've read somewhere that when the PC freezes constantly for short amount of times you should enable DMA for the hard drive. Unfortunately the drive doesn't show up in the device manager (probably because of compatbility mode). Is it possible to enable DMA in DOS or is that strictly a Windows thing?