How much memory do You have?

why do You testmem:off while having difficulties?

what does mem say after himem anyway?

Imperious wrote:

How much memory do You have?

what she said

Are you suggesting you only have 584k free after loading nothing but HIMEM? In that case there's probably some other weird option set in your BIOS. Or possibly you have some kind of boot sector virus.

I use /testmem:off to cut down on boot time. I removed it and the machine behaves the same. I have 32MB of FPM installed (2x16mb).

Jorpho wrote:

Are you suggesting you only have 584k free after loading nothing but HIMEM? In that case there's probably some other weird option set in your BIOS. Or possibly you have some kind of boot sector virus.

That's because norton commander and the CD-ROM driver were loaded into memory. I removed both, and only DOS takes up some memory (very little) but emm386 still won't load. I highly doubt there's any virus since I've used it in another machine where emm386 loads fine. Besides, I didn't use any old floppies or questionable files. There's 0% chance of a virus.

please load himem and emm386 with /verbose and provide the mem output with all those pesky /switches

Any weird RAM settings in your BIOS? Any parity settings?

kanecvr wrote:

I highly doubt there's any virus since I've used it in another machine where emm386 loads fine.

By "it" do you mean the hard drive, or what?

The best way to eliminate the question of hardware problems once and for all would be to make an image of the drive and boot it up in VMware. If there's still a problem in that case, then there aren't many other possibilities other than a virus.

I currently don't use emm386 very often, but I think it could help to have a look at the memory map in MS Diagnostics
(MSD) or to let CheckIt! do a memory test. As far as I know, it also has the ability to display memory usage in base/UMB region.
If noting works, you could try to boot from a floppy (incl. himem/emm386) or to use Qemm or similar competing products.

Jorpho wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

I highly doubt there's any virus since I've used it in another machine where emm386 loads fine.

By "it" do you mean the hard drive, or what?

The best way to eliminate the question of hardware problems once and for all would be to make an image of the drive and boot it up in VMware. If there's still a problem in that case, then there aren't many other possibilities other than a virus.

I used the hdd to boot dos on another machine and emm386 loaded fine.

gdjacobs wrote:

Any weird RAM settings in your BIOS? Any parity settings?

Nope. Conservative values all the way.

Alrighty. You might have to specify memory chunks, then.

I agree that for troubleshooting purposes it might be useful to try an alternative, like JEMM386.