Windows 98se advice.

just_jue

Hi,

Thanks for such a great site, been interested reading.

I run a small business clearing I.T equipment and for a while now have been building and selling Windows 98se systems and components.

Just wanted to ask a couple of questions: (sorry if the get asked all the time)

1. What is the maximum RAM for Windows 98, some people say 512mb is best as above this it can have unsteady results.

2. When trying to FDISK a bigger than 120gb hard drive I cannot get to read the fully size, is this a normal problem with Windows 98 and can you get around it?

Thanks again

JJ

Kurtisdede

just_jue wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for such a great site, been interested reading.

I run a small business clearing I.T equipment and for a while now have been building and selling Windows 98se systems and components.

Just wanted to ask a couple of questions: (sorry if the get asked all the time)

1. What is the maximum RAM for Windows 98, some people say 512mb is best as above this it can have unsteady results.

2. When trying to FDISK a bigger than 120gb hard drive I cannot get to read the fully size, is this a normal problem with Windows 98 and can you get around it?

Thanks again

JJ

For the first question, 1GB RAM will be fine with Win98, however 512mb is the best. Above 1GB can be tricky - it won't start up till you do some changes. and it won't recognise anything bigger than 2GB Ram.
For the second question, I have no idea.

SomeGuy

If you can't FDISK a partition larger than 127GB, then it is probably a BIOS limitation. You would need to either update your BIOS to add LBA support, or use a drive overlay software like Ontrack Disk Manager.

Although I strongly suggest not making individual FAT32 partitions larger than 120GB, there is a seperate issue (non LBA, it doesn't matter where on the disk the partition is) that can cause data corruption. (writing to a file in real-mode DOS more than 127GB in to the partition will wrap around and overwrite data at the beginning of the disk)

just_jue

Thanks for the replies.

I don't know if anyone else has had problems with certain D845 and above Intel Chipsets, even with the downloads from the Intel site I get errors either blue screens or the video drivers works until you reboot then it reverts to 16 colours.

Don't seem to have any trouble with either SIS or Via Chipsets.

I have just built a nice AMD Athlon 2ghz system with MSI motherboard and 256mb Video card and it runs like a dream.

Since I have started building systems I have been making a database of Windows 98 drivers, I did see a Windows 98 driver download that was 6 cd's worth but never managed to get it working sadly.

Thanks again for your replies

JJ

epguy7

just_jue wrote:

Hi,


2. When trying to FDISK a bigger than 120gb hard drive I cannot get to read the fully size, is this a normal problem with Windows 98 and can you get around it?

hi just_jue

You need a patched FDISK.EXE from Microsoft support KB article 263044:
"Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB"
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/263044

Copuy the updated FDISK.EXE file onto a Win98 boot disk, overwriting the existing version, and you can properly partition disks bigger then 64Gb, even 137Gb+ hard drives with updated BIOS support for large HDs.

pcgeek

I agree that 512mb ram is the best for Win98se. Over 1gb causes Windows to gives a ''not enough extended memory to boot Windows'' error. The speed of Windows 98 greatly varies depending on the amount of ram used. It can take a minute or more on 8 or 16mb of ram, but on 512mb it will take a few seconds. These are my results from a few years ago when I did VirtualBox testing of the memory limitations of Windows 98 SE (assuming an AMD athlon 64x2 4800+ CPU @ 2.49ghz).

KCompRoom2000

just_jue wrote:

I don't know if anyone else has had problems with certain D845 and above Intel Chipsets, even with the downloads from the Intel site I get errors either blue screens or the video drivers works until you reboot then it reverts to 16 colours.

Is the video adapter set to IRQ15? According to Display.txt from the Windows folder on 9x versions, Windows will assume that the secondary IDE controller is set to IRQ15, Causing the video driver to fall back to VGA mode if the video adapter is on that same IRQ setting, Check the BIOS and change the IRQ settings if applicable.

As for the RAM, I remember some KB article mentioning a solution to using more than 1GB of RAM on 9x, Although from what I remember it doesn't always work, I know someone made a patch for this but IDK how easy it is to find, This doesn't bother me anyways since 512MB is fine for me, I have 384MB in my 98SE Gaming PC and it's working great.