I'm sorry I can't help you, but I used to have that problem on my Win98SE tower at my mother's house--until she went homeless. 🙁

Harry Potter wrote on Yesterday, 14:13:

I'm sorry I can't help you, but I used to have that problem on my Win98SE tower at my mother's house--until she went homeless. 🙁

Yeah, I noticed in that thread you were experiencing the same problem. I take it you never got to the bottom of the issue?

I do the only thing I can do: cut the power off. 🙁

Harry Potter wrote on Yesterday, 15:08:

I do the only thing I can do: cut the power off. 🙁

I don't have any "real" Win98 systems anymore, but I do recall having this problem when I did.

And I too would just kill power most of the time - I never had any problems with disk corruption or it even thinking it had to check the disk. I think it had gotten far enough that it had cleared active stuff to disk and closed everything. At least in my case the "hang" seemed to be right as it tried to soft-power off.

This was back in the days when some drives needed to be "parked" and at first I was worried that it might not have parked the drive... so I would RESET (IIRC: It had shutdown far enough that Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't work) - and often it would shutdown completely right after a reset. So I think that some component of Win just gets in a "funny" state

DaveDDS wrote on Yesterday, 15:44:

I don't have any "real" Win98 systems anymore, but I do recall having this problem when I did. […]
Show full quote

Harry Potter wrote on Yesterday, 15:08:

I do the only thing I can do: cut the power off. 🙁

I don't have any "real" Win98 systems anymore, but I do recall having this problem when I did.

And I too would just kill power most of the time - I never had any problems with disk corruption or it even thinking it had to check the disk. I think it had gotten far enough that it had cleared active stuff to disk and closed everything. At least in my case the "hang" seemed to be right as it tried to soft-power off.

This was back in the days when some drives needed to be "parked" and at first I was worried that it might not have parked the drive... so I would RESET (IIRC: It had shutdown far enough that Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't work) - and often it would shutdown completely right after a reset. So I think that some component of Win just gets in a "funny" state

But is there no way of getting the boot log to automatically run each boot? I'm just curious if I can catch it out when it happens again. See what triggers it.

Yes, this was a problem with Win98 back in the day.

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 15:59:

But is there no way of getting the boot log to automatically run each boot? I'm just curious if I can catch it out when it happens again. See what triggers it.

I don't know that this would give you much ... I think this is a bug in w98 internals, maybe some memory gets trampled on, maybe something gets set to an odd state. By the time the effect happens, it's pretty much all the way through shutting down, has stopped everything and just "hangs" where you can't do any interaction with anything.

The only way I can think of the "debug" it would be to use an in-circuit emulator (or maybe a virtual machine with extra good CPIU level debugging abilities) and see exactly what it is doing when it hangs. Then if your debug system has the ability - log all accesses to that whatever memory or hardware it gets stuck accessing ... then maybe you could figure out what initiated the condition.

And given the amount of code involved and lack of source code, be ready to spend a lifetime going through logs and pokeing through code in memory trying to figure out what it's doing.

And even doing all this might not reveal anything - the root cause could be many "levels" away from the apparent cause of the end-effect, hidden inside complexity inside complexity (and so on)...

-This was something that happened to enough systems that I think it were easily solvable by the guys who created the system, Microsoft would have done so.

DaveDDS wrote on Yesterday, 20:22:

I don't know that this would give you much ... I think this is a bug in w98 internals, maybe some memory gets trampled on, maybe […]
Show full quote

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 15:59:

But is there no way of getting the boot log to automatically run each boot? I'm just curious if I can catch it out when it happens again. See what triggers it.

I don't know that this would give you much ... I think this is a bug in w98 internals, maybe some memory gets trampled on, maybe something gets set to an odd state. By the time the effect happens, it's pretty much all the way through shutting down, has stopped everything and just "hangs" where you can't do any interaction with anything.

The only way I can think of the "debug" it would be to use an in-circuit emulator (or maybe a virtual machine with extra good CPIU level debugging abilities) and see exactly what it is doing when it hangs. Then if your debug system has the ability - log all accesses to that whatever memory or hardware it gets stuck accessing ... then maybe you could figure out what initiated the condition.

And given the amount of code involved and lack of source code, be ready to spend a lifetime going through logs and pokeing through code in memory trying to figure out what it's doing.

And even doing all this might not reveal anything - the root cause could be many "levels" away from the apparent cause of the end-effect, hidden inside complexity inside complexity (and so on)...

-This was something that happened to enough systems that I think it were easily solvable by the guys who created the system, Microsoft would have done so.

Hmm. I see what you mean. It does sound like it would be too much work for such a small gain. I just figured it could have been a specific driver causing it. One poster on Reddit suspected it was the SB Live drivers. The original poster mentions two shutdown patches, whatever they are.

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/1 … the_windows_98/

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 20:31:

... I just figured it could have been a specific driver causing it. One poster on Reddit suspected it was the SB Live drivers ...

Oh it *could* me something as simple as that - and not hard to test. Eliminate any hardware you don't need - Get a blank HD - do simple msoft/only W98 install (don't even add video drivers - use VGA if you have to at first) - See how reliable it is. Then add your extra stuff back one at a time and see where it starts to give problems.

It happens also without a SB Live.

Hm. I guess it's not too important of an issue for further testing if it's a common thing with 98. Though removing components/drivers is something I can do if it becomes frequent.

It's a weird one - I had it happen on some systems but not others, others report the same (happends to some but not others)'

I don't have a real W98 sysem anymore, but I do have W98 installed in VMware ... I don't use it a whole lot (only when I want to test something under it) but I've never seen it happen here.

My 98SE system did have this issue, for some reason after installing the OS a few times (because I was messing with stuff) it no longer does it. So it seems software related - I must have skipped installing something that I did on previous installs. No idea what it would be though. I notice it also shuts down a lot faster than it used to as well.

NeoG_ wrote on Yesterday, 23:45:

My 98SE system did have this issue, for some reason after installing the OS a few times (because I was messing with stuff) it no longer does it. So it seems software related - I must have skipped installing something that I did on previous installs. No idea what it would be though. I notice it also shuts down a lot faster than it used to as well.

I had the same issue with my 98se machine, also fixed after reinstalling. Second time around I used the Soundblaster Live vxd driver and made sure the dos driver wasn't in windows startup, instead using a batch script to load it manually as needed. I think I also disabled serial and/or parallel ports in the bios, and removed the cdrom and floppy drive as I'll never need them.

This is just what Windows 98 does. Good luck ever solving it. Not really worth solving imo.

You might want to look at the Microsoft-recommended 260067 Mapped Drives Shutdown Supplement update.

I had this same issue on a win 98 machine. I dont have the issue anymore becuase I think i sold that machine. I used to just power it off when it stuck there

akula65 wrote on Today, 17:28:

You might want to look at the Microsoft-recommended 260067 Mapped Drives Shutdown Supplement update.

I didn't even know an update was released for this specific problem. Thanks. I'll give it a try and see how things go. 😀

Hm. As usual, not much luck finding it. Links are mostly dead online. Does Vogons not have a section for retro Operating System updates?