Ok, so I've put my new 486 together (AMD X5 133, Asus PVI486SP3, Matrox Millenium 2, AWE32, XR385, GUS Max, MPU-IPC-T, Ultra ATA controller... the works!) and have transferred the drive that I was using in the previous machine (a Pentium Pro, running Win 98SE in dos-only mode).

I have a small OS/Boot partition (120Mb), with the rest of the (huge) drive partitioned into a couple of large fat32 chunks.

I've done the following from a Win98SE boot floppy to initialise the OS partition and clear out the previous Linux Grub boot loader (the P-Pro dual booted between Linux and Win98-dos)

fdisk /mbr
format c: /s

This gets me a bootable drive and I can copy back the various driver and util directories I made a backup of (SB16, ULTRASND and some UTILS folders with stuff like Norton Utilities, SDD, Sysspeed, Cutemouse etc). Access to the remaining fat32 partitions is fine - all of the games, demos etc previously installed are working without issue.

Everything goes well, until I copy back the config.sys that I was using previously. More specifically, when there is *any* config.sys *at all* I get the Windows 98 startup menu with the following text:

"Warning: Windows has detected a registry/configuration error.
Choose, Command prompt only, and run SCANREG."

It then hangs whichever of the options are chosen.

Now, there is no trace of windows on the drive, and no registry to scan. I've gone so far as to explicitly set bootgui=0 and logo=0 in msdos.sys to always boot straight to dos.

At this point the only recourse to get past the above error is to reboot via floppy and remove msdos.sys and config.sys, of course, this means that next reboot it tries to load windows and shows the Windows 98 splash screen.

Can anyone see anything wrong here?