@realGoldenRod

Try disabling your iGPU?

I do not have that option in my BIOS.

Here's pics of my BIOS

BIOS cont...

looks like a good build, i use an MSI board with a via P4M800 chipset, also a Celeron D360 3.46ghz so your cpu will be fine, but a lowly fx5200 and sound blaster live, anyway i've had pretty much the same problem but with xp, the installer would stop saying either a file couldnt be copied or found, i tried different discs and the installer would continue but then when installing programs/games i found important files missing from my installation, problem turned out to be a bad dvd drive, once i switched to a different one problem sorted.

as for your bios disable serial port, definitely disable the parallel port as its using irq 7, your sound card may need to use this, disable onboard audio and ethernet/network adapter, if you need this you can enable once you've got everything installed, also if theres any conflicts you've got a pci menu to change any irq's, also good idea to plug your sound card in the bottom pci slot, as for your hdd/ssd set the whole drive as one partition, when formatting i use (format c: /s/u) or (format c: s/u/) obviously without brackets make sure the dashes / are in the right place i always forget which on is correct.🤣 its one of those two. (also there is an iso version of the windows boot disc if you dont want to use floppy, the one i use also has ramdisk worth hunting down a copy, you can burn it to dvd or cdr)

"s" is for startup disc to make the install bootable, "u" is for unconditional format, tho if your starting your install whichever way your doing it is right.

as for the cd drive try a different one even a sata one should be fine, also you can plug your ssd in through sata and shouldnt have any problems, i havent used sata drives on my p4m800 build with 98 but have on a different computer and didnt have any problems also i was using a 60gb ssd, only thing with sata/ide is windows 98 doesnt like more than 4 enabled, so if you've got both ide headers enabled for a total of 4 plus the 2 sata's for a total of 6, windows might not boot, so if u enable sata make sure to disable one of the ide headers, so you only have 2 sata's and 1 ide header (master/slave) for you total of 4, even if you're only using 2 drives 1 dvd and 1 SSD, 98 can refuse to boot with more enabled.

I will try those things. Before posting my BIOS images I reset to default settings in case anyone had suggestions, so thank-you DudeFace for that. I have a Geforce 8400GS 512mb PCI card that I tried in the PCI slot and connected via DVI and got the same error so it's looking like either a bad CD image or a bad CD drive as you suggested. As silly as this sounds, I currently have the CD drive mounted vertically on my test bench, so I'm try it horizontally. Maybe for whatever reason it's not reading the disc 100%. Just one last test before I source a different one. Does anyone have any recommendations for an IDE CD Drive? Something like a "you can never go wrong with this brand"?

In case anyone was interested in seeing this hideous amalgamation of tech I'm working with. I've since unmounted the CD drive. The cooler I'm using is the Deepcool Gammaxx 400. It's brackets fit with socket 775. I completely repasted the Radeon's cooler and had to oil the bearing as well.

Running the setup with the CD drive horizontally unfortunately did not yield favorable results. I will begin sourcing a "new" IDE CD Drive as well as burning a new install/boot CD. I should probably source a bootable floppy too. I'll keep y'all posted. Feel free to comment any other suggestions if you have any.

realGoldenRod wrote on 2024-09-14, 18:06:

source a different one. Does anyone have any recommendations for an IDE CD Drive? Something like a "you can never go wrong with this brand"?

its just luck of the draw, any drive can go bad for any number of reasons, out of all the drives i have only that one had that problem, they can just burn themselves out quickly especially if its a writer drive in which case the disc will spin up and down continuously not even show up in "My Computer", those that use rubber belts can dry out or stretch and slip, motors clog up with dust, or just wear out and fail and not spin up as they should, also the magnetised disc which clamps the disc in place either wears or loses its magnetivity and you get disc slippage, or the motor that moves the laser fails and it doesn't have full range, one drive i have the laser doesn't move at all, also the laser weakens meaning you'll need to adjust pots, this isnt a guaranteed fix, i used to fix a lot of ps2 phats for my job years back and you'll be forever doing it trying to squeeze some life out of it to read your discs, its just not worth the effort, we used to get new lasers from sony which didnt fix the problem as other issues can arise with drives like the ones i listed above (worn motors/lost magnetivity on the disc holder). my point being any drive thats had a lot of use isnt going to be much good, even if you find a new old stock drive, it could be driven by old rubber bands tha have aged, or the magnetic disc that holds the cd in place will have weakened, also i'm not sure what the lenses are made out of if they are not glass but plastic, plastic can go cloudy with age so that could be another potential problem.

bit of a long read but i think i've just about covered everything, anyway best option is just pick up a few drives until you find one that works well enough, if you're not bothered about plugging your dvd drive into your sound card just pick up a brand new sata drive

realGoldenRod wrote on 2024-09-14, 19:04:

Running the setup with the CD drive horizontally unfortunately did not yield favorable results. I will begin sourcing a "new" IDE CD Drive as well as burning a new install/boot CD. I should probably source a bootable floppy too. I'll keep y'all posted. Feel free to comment any other suggestions if you have any.

best off finding a boot iso, you can have exactly the same problems with your floppy drive as you're having with your cd drive.🤣 thats why i switched to a boot cd instead of a boot floppy also it loads faster, make sure the iso includes a ramdrive.

also if you haven't already burnt a new 98 cd try that first, might be lucky could just be a bad burn, don't use the drive that might be causing issues and burn at the lowest speed your drive supports no lower than x8, just dont burn at maximum.

DudeFace wrote on 2024-09-14, 19:16:

realGoldenRod wrote on 2024-09-14, 19:04:

Running the setup with the CD drive horizontally unfortunately did not yield favorable results. I will begin sourcing a "new" IDE CD Drive as well as burning a new install/boot CD. I should probably source a bootable floppy too. I'll keep y'all posted. Feel free to comment any other suggestions if you have any.

best off finding a boot iso, you can have exactly the same problems with your floppy drive as you're having with your cd drive.🤣 thats why i switched to a boot cd instead of a boot floppy also it loads faster, make sure the iso includes a ramdrive.

also if you haven't already burnt a new 98 cd try that first, might be lucky could just be a bad burn, don't use the drive that might be causing issues and burn at the lowest speed your drive supports no lower than x8, just dont burn at maximum.

I will try that first. Thanks! I have an ASUS DVD-RW OEM drive in my XP rig, which says it can write at 8x, so we'll see how that goes.

Worth testing the onboard.

myne wrote on 2024-09-15, 04:36:

Worth testing the onboard.

I tried that and got the same error. Also tried a different GPU in the PCI slot via DVI and got the same error there as well.

https://microsoft.public.win98.setup.narkive. … loading-vga-drv

Your first post might have been on the money
CPU: Intel Celeron D 326 2.53 GHz (maybe the CPU is too fast?)

Windowsupdaterestored.com might have the hotfix
Not sure how you'd install it

Safe mode work?

Tried ME?
One guy in ocau has made a pretty interesting ME update disc https://forums.overclockers.com.au/threads/sh … e-love.1311910/

might want to look into this:

https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x?tab=r … speed-limit-bug

never tried it myself though as I've got XP on everything that fast.

myne wrote on 2024-09-16, 00:01:

https://microsoft.public.win98.setup.narkive. … loading-vga-drv […]
Show full quote

https://microsoft.public.win98.setup.narkive. … loading-vga-drv

Your first post might have been on the money
CPU: Intel Celeron D 326 2.53 GHz (maybe the CPU is too fast?)

Windowsupdaterestored.com might have the hotfix
Not sure how you'd install it

Safe mode work?

i dont think thats the problem only windows 95 had a cpu limit and needed a fix for cpus above 2.1ghz, also my 98 pc has a board with the same chipset and a Celeron D 360 3.46ghz, ive never had that problem.

Queen K Juul wrote on 2024-09-16, 00:19:

might want to look into this:

https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x?tab=r … speed-limit-bug

never tried it myself though as I've got XP on everything that fast.

looks like that fix is for newer recent cpus, also the speed patch for 98 only applies to early builds/betas

DudeFace wrote on 2024-09-16, 00:24:

looks like that fix is for newer recent cpus, also the speed patch for 98 only applies to early builds/betas

I don't think so, it specifically says it works on 98SE and Me, which both still have a 2Ghz+ bug.

I solved the issue finally!!! Been working on this all weekend.

The issue was my SATA > IDE bridge. Now I shall regale you all with the tale of how I figured that out:

I created a new boot CD and got the same error. I then followed philscomputerlab's guide on booting from a USB. I had a lot of difficulty with the boot USB, so I burned another disc with the custom boot98sc.ima file on it and followed through his guide on formatting my drive and copying the boot files over to boot from my SSD. After all that I booted the 98SE OEM through freedos and I still got the same "error loading vga.dvr". I thought that was kind of weird because I only copied the base win98 setup folder onto the freedos boot, and not the drivers folder. I started swapping my SSD through all the IDE ports and got inconsistent connections. Disk I/O errors and sometimes it wouldn't even read the SSD was there. I disconnected and finally tried SATA and it booted through the setup menu, no "error loading vga.dvr" this time. However, I encountered more errors during the setup as it would hang up during the hardware search and if I let it time out I would get a blue screen write error. Restarting allowed the setup to continue, however after all was said and done, it would freeze on the Win 98 splash screen. I could only boot into safe mode. I decided to start all over from scratch, redid my partition, SSD still connected via SATA and my CD drive is hooked back up via IDE, and booting my original Win 98 SE boot/install CD. I removed my Radeon X800XL and my sound card and I'm connected via VGA on the mobo. Went through the setup, just did the full typical install, no changes to anything, still got hung up on the hardware search looking for the floppy drive, restarted before a blue screen timeout, and the rest of the install proceeded as normal with no more errors.

Everything appears to be okay, it's even booting fine with 512mb of RAM at 400mhz, however, the machine won't shutdown. It gets hung up on the shutdown splash screen and then I have to hard restart and go through scandisk on startup. I tried run > msconfig > advanced > unticked "disable fast shutdown" and tried again and now it restarts on shutdown, sooooooo progress right?

I have a Win 98 SE update ISO I'm gonna try, so hopefully that will resolve the issue. Still need to install my SB Audigy ZS, ATI Catalyst and USB drivers.

Got lan?
Windowsupdaterestored.com