It's highly advised to avoid these non-standard upgrade packs, as they can or will add instability to Windows 98 SE installations due to injection of Windows Me system files. Service Pack 3 is also part of that mix. All you need for Windows 98 SE is Windows Installer 2.o and DirectX 9.0c. No point in trying to patch an old relic with an unsupported pack.

Outside of my rant, you can go through your DOSSTART.BAT file and look for anything that may be halting your DOS mode from functioning as it should.

I tried looking, but I cant seem to find DOSSTART.BAT at all

You can try BootGUI=0 in MSDOS.SYS, but of course - no guarantee.

Yes, it's better to avoid all those unofficial update packs - they may work fine on the author's hardware, and with his use cases, but cause mysterious problems with somebody else's...

I cant find MSDOS.SYS either.

That normal. It's a hidden system file. You can make the files visible by the settings menu in Windows Explorer.

@Dmetsys I for one consider KernelEx being important, though. Along with unicows.dll and gdiplus.dll.
Otherwise Windows 98 can't run any notable software anymore, except for dinosaur software from about 30 years ago.
The later releases of KernelEx merely patch Windows 9x in memory and don't corrupt any system files.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-27, 07:56:

That normal. It's a hidden system file. You can make the files visible by the settings menu in Windows Explorer. […]
Show full quote

That normal. It's a hidden system file. You can make the files visible by the settings menu in Windows Explorer.

@Dmetsys I for one consider KernelEx being important, though. Along with unicows.dll and gdiplus.dll.
Otherwise Windows 98 can't run any notable software anymore, except for dinosaur software from about 30 years ago.
The later releases of KernelEx merely patch Windows 9x in memory and don't corrupt any system files.

That's only applicable if you are using browsers like K-Meleon. If you are not browsing on 98 SE, you don't need KernelEx.

Tangential to this discussion, since this is an emulated environment, likely running from a disk image file, making and keeping backup copies of the disk image file is easy to do and makes issues related to a failed update or patch trivially easy to revert.

I would highly recommend making a backup before trying/testing something new, next time.

Dmetsys wrote on 2024-11-27, 14:30:

That's only applicable if you are using browsers like K-Meleon. If you are not browsing on 98 SE, you don't need KernelEx.

🤷‍♂️

Personally, I don’t really browse the web on Windows 98SE. Except for reading vintage HTML sites or docs on CD.
I'm rather interested in electronics and Windows 9x allows playing with i/o ports.

You know, soldering stations, breadboards, through-hole components, transistors, relays, microcontrollers such as PIC16F84A or Arduino/ATmega328p, parallel and serial ports.
The old school stuff. Some applications were written in VB6, still. Atmel AVR Studio 4 is vintage soft, too.

With help of KernelEx/unicows/gdiplus, a lot of Windows XP and Vista era programs can be run on Windows 98SE, alongsude of the classics.
Some emulators and codec packs, too, which is a nice bonus.

That's convenienant for my Compaq Armada laptop, which runs Windows 98SE and is a bit too old for XP also.

Edit:

I would highly recommend making a backup before trying/testing something new, next time.

That's a good idea. Personally, I'm using Acronis True Image 7 to 10 inside of the VMs.
True Image 7 can be installed on Windows 98SE, still, I believe.
Though I'm rather using the live medium here (ISO). If I have two HDD images mounted, I can copy over the content from one image to another.
It's helpful with VM images that need HDD files different disk IDs or if fixed-sized HDD images are used.

I’ve decide to just resort to starting over.

Alevam-Inc. wrote on 2024-11-30, 19:02:

I’ve decide to just resort to starting over.

For what it's worth, I've encountered this specific problem on real hardware before as well. I tend to stick with minimal official updates as mentioned earlier in the topic - Windows Installer 2.0, .NET framework 1.1, DirectX for the card installed, and NUSB33. Inevitably, through experiments I'll break MS-DOS mode and/or the AT shutdown screen (The lovely orange "It's now safe to shutdown your PC" will be replaced with a black screen or hang).

As a part of my setup process I now regularly test switching to MS-DOS mode and shutting down to make sure I haven't broken them (yet).

Cosmic wrote on 2024-12-01, 19:38:

Alevam-Inc. wrote on 2024-11-30, 19:02:

I’ve decide to just resort to starting over.

For what it's worth, I've encountered this specific problem on real hardware before as well. I tend to stick with minimal official updates as mentioned earlier in the topic - Windows Installer 2.0, .NET framework 1.1, DirectX for the card installed, and NUSB33. Inevitably, through experiments I'll break MS-DOS mode and/or the AT shutdown screen (The lovely orange "It's now safe to shutdown your PC" will be replaced with a black screen or hang).

As a part of my setup process I now regularly test switching to MS-DOS mode and shutting down to make sure I haven't broken them (yet).

Hi, are you really sure Windows 98SE has hung? How long did you wait?
I'm asking, because I've observed very long boot up and shutdown times with Windows 98SE.
Sometimes taking minutes (no kidding).

Similarily, Windows XP SP3 on one of my PCs needs minutes to shut down.
The power off via ATX PSU happens after the screen had been turned black for quite a while.

Cosmic wrote on 2024-12-01, 19:38:

For what it's worth, I've encountered this specific problem on real hardware before as well. I tend to stick with minimal official updates as mentioned earlier in the topic - Windows Installer 2.0, .NET framework 1.1, DirectX for the card installed, and NUSB33. Inevitably, through experiments I'll break MS-DOS mode and/or the AT shutdown screen (The lovely orange "It's now safe to shutdown your PC" will be replaced with a black screen or hang).

As a part of my setup process I now regularly test switching to MS-DOS mode and shutting down to make sure I haven't broken them (yet).

I'm wondering what exactly causes the problem with MS-DOS mode...
Perhaps something originally designed for Windows ME ?
It would be logical - the ME has MS-DOS mode deliberately broken, so can't expect some ME code to properly handle that feature in 98SE.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-01, 20:00:

Hi, are you really sure Windows 98SE has hung? How long did you wait? I'm asking, because I've observed very long boot up and sh […]
Show full quote

Cosmic wrote on 2024-12-01, 19:38:

Alevam-Inc. wrote on 2024-11-30, 19:02:

I’ve decide to just resort to starting over.

For what it's worth, I've encountered this specific problem on real hardware before as well. I tend to stick with minimal official updates as mentioned earlier in the topic - Windows Installer 2.0, .NET framework 1.1, DirectX for the card installed, and NUSB33. Inevitably, through experiments I'll break MS-DOS mode and/or the AT shutdown screen (The lovely orange "It's now safe to shutdown your PC" will be replaced with a black screen or hang).

As a part of my setup process I now regularly test switching to MS-DOS mode and shutting down to make sure I haven't broken them (yet).

Hi, are you really sure Windows 98SE has hung? How long did you wait?
I'm asking, because I've observed very long boot up and shutdown times with Windows 98SE.
Sometimes taking minutes (no kidding).

Similarily, Windows XP SP3 on one of my PCs needs minutes to shut down.
The power off via ATX PSU happens after the screen had been turned black for quite a while.

It is a good point! I did try to wait at least a minute or two, but maybe it wasn't long enough. Typically with a fresh install the shutdown splash screen will appear in less than a minute, so when it stopped appearing, I figured something had changed or broken.

This reminds me - I did do some research to try and fix this, so I'll post a couple notes on how I tried to fix it:

• For AT systems (no soft power off) it can be helpful to install Windows 98 with the setup switch to disable ACPI: setup /pi
• If the shutdown splash stops appearing, check Device Manager and see if the system is displayed as "ACPI PC". If so, it's possible to change it back to "Standard PC" and reboot which disables ACPI and sometimes restores the shutdown splash.
• Lastly, it's possible to change the ACPI setting using Regedit:
  
  Enable ACPI:
  
  Copy code to clipboard

  1REGEDIT4
  2[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Detect]
  3"ACPIOption"=dword:00000001
  

  Disable ACPI:
  
  Copy code to clipboard

  1REGEDIT4
  2[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Detect]
  3"ACPIOption"=dword:00000002