Pic of error?

Used to get this problem with dos games under win95/98 used to have to make memory adjustments but can’t remember what it’s called or how to do it it’s been 30 years since I’ve used it.

Is it a DOS program and trying to use protected mode or some such?

Is there anything in config.sys or autoexec.bat taking up whatever memory it's trying to use? Memory managers? emm386.exe?

ratfink wrote on 2024-10-05, 09:48:

Is it a DOS program and trying to use protected mode or some such?

Is there anything in config.sys or autoexec.bat taking up whatever memory it's trying to use? Memory managers? emm386.exe?

No, this is a 32-bit Windows program I'm trying to install — Total Commander 5.11. Same goes for 7zip, I'll post a screenshot in a while, but this is definitely not a DOS memory management problem.

The Windows installation is completely fresh, no extra software added, not even extra drivers in the current iteration.

FWIW, I've been using FreeDOS on this system for a while before switching to Windows, without any issues.

Have you tried Windows 98 SE ?
I suspect there's something wrong with chipset drivers.
Windows 95 is too old to be aware of that chipset - and while it should be possible to install the necessary drivers, it may be easier to install a whole newer system...

Here's the error message

Grzyb wrote on 2024-10-05, 11:06:

Have you tried Windows 98 SE ?
I suspect there's something wrong with chipset drivers.
Windows 95 is too old to be aware of that chipset - and while it should be possible to install the necessary drivers, it may be easier to install a whole newer system...

I did, but it was BSODding a lot, also complaining about GDI memory.

Usually you get that either after windows has been running 12+ hours, resource depletion, OR because there's a graphics driver error or video chip fault (overheat).. things that help, trying different driver versions, turning off font caching and graphics acceleration, adding cooling to graphics core.

Ermmm, I tried installing the videocard drivers and now I'm BSODding under Win95 as well with various memory errors. Tried reinstalling Win95, the installer fails and now memtest is showing me memory errors even though it didn't yesterday.

Checked the voltage on +5 and +12V just in case, but nothing seems off. Lowered the clock just in case, still nothing. Somethings is very weird with this system.

Memtest?

Once you've run it, if you find bad addresses look here: Re: want to use pc-133 cas2 512mb sdram with bad memory addresses under win9x

So, long story short, two things happened.

First, seems like the two sticks of 32MB RAM I've been using on MediaGX did fail — it didn't show during the first memtest, but did with the second one. So that's where the BSODding comes from. But memory errors while trying to install software didn't go away.

Second, I started playing around with another build (440BX) with 98SE and started getting same errors using three different sets of RAM. The two machines share virtually no hardware. So I started suspecting software, tried different Windows CDs, etc.

In the end I randomly tried to install the Total Commander version that came on a CD as opposed to the one I've been trying to download using ftp all this time. And it just worked!

So for whatever reason Windows' built-in ftp client was corrupting (?) files when downloading them from my RetroNAS build. As soon as I managed to install Total Commander from another source, it worked with my RetroNAS just fine.

So weird, I've been using this routine to set up my machines for years, guess one of the updates to RetroNAS broke something.