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Low Conventional memory, Rom or Ram in page frame

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First post, by Vaderman

Posted on 
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Greetings!

I've been reading this site for months. It's helped me build 386SX , Ppro/voodoo1 and athlon/voodoo2 systems, but i finally hit a roadblock that I can't figure out. So this is my first post.

I have recently acquired a Compaq LTE 5300 p133 laptop with 32 MB, 1.25GB and the multibay full ISA dock. Windows 98 is loaded and it's like a time capsule from 2003.
I am using win98SE version of DOS 7.10. If I boot with my 6.22 floppy it does not see the C drive. I'd like to preserve the 98 install as I don't have a drivers disk for this machine or a CD-ROM drive.

I can not get my memory managed to the point where I can play games. Best I've done is 581k free, but i don't think i gave it the right addresses and it crashes with scrambled video on the way into Wolf3d and Dune2 just hangs at the DOS prompt.
I started with my boot disk from my Ppro system. It can't see the C drive.
Tried copying my configs and files from my 386 system. Scored a whopping 435k free of conventional memory.
Then i hit the web for help, but it hasn't helped enough.

EMM386 gives me a warning of "Option Rom or Ram detected within page frame."
My largest free UMB is reported as 80k. I'm a little concerned that 'system' is enormous and I don't know why.
I am on my second run of wiping everything out, finding a tutorial for the perfect memory settings and using those configs and files.
I am also trying to use MSD.exe to look at the upper memory, but i suspect that i'm not quite doing it right and running a game conflicts with the video ROM in the upper memory.

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Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Reply 1 of 1, by AlaricD

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You could make a Win98 startup diskette to experiment with the exclusions in EMM386.EXE.

To get started with boot menus when booting from the hard drive, remove the S H R attributes from MSDOS.SYS (attrib -s -h -r msdos.sys) in the root of C:, then edit MSDOS.SYS. Under [Options] set BootMenu=1 and BootMenuDelay=5 (so you have time to react to the menu).

If you don't have a SCSI controller you can safely change DoubleBuffer=1 to DoubleBuffer=0, saving a few more KB of conventional memory. Then add the S H R attributes (attrib +s +h +r) back to MSDOS.SYS.

Once you've done this, when rebooting from the C:, choose "Step-by-step confirmation" and skip the loading of things like the DoubeSpace driver (if the drive isn't doublespaced) IFSHLP.SYS and scanning the Registry.

I've created some complicated CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT menus myself, and one that give me 2MB of EMS also gives me a "largest executable program size" of 620K (634,800 bytes) and loads DOSKEY and a DOS mouse driver. It'd have slightly less if I hooked up the CD-ROM drive (SBIDE.SYS would stay resident and MSCDEX.EXE would also load).

It may take quite a bit of experimenting, but a bootable Win98 diskette would mean preserving your current startup file settings.

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