Stack Overflow error when installing Win 98

iloveyou-txt-vbs

Okay, so I'm trying to install Windows 98 SE on a Virtual PC. I already have MS-DOS v. 6.22 installed, and every time I've tried to boot since installing either DOS or Win98 I get a stack overflow error and the machine hangs.

The machine has 256 MB of RAM assigned and a dynamic virtual hard disk image. I can't get to the config.sys file at this point without booting into Windows and triggering the stack overflow. I can make a whole different machine and try again from the beginning if need be, but I'd like to know the cause so I don't make the same mistake on a new one and end up wasting my time.

Any tips would be welcome!

SomeGuy

If you can't even boot DOS, then something has gotten badly messed up.

Exactly at what point does the error occur?

Off hand I'm not aware of any 98 installation issues that would result in a "stack overflow".

I'd probably just start over from scratch, and not bother with DOS 6.22 (unless there is some specific reason you need it). Just boot from a floppy boot disk with the 98 ISO attached, copy the setup folder to a folder on the virtual hard drive and run setup from the hard drive. When setup is done, you can back up the virtual hard drive image before installing other software that might bork things up.

sl1fka

First, how big is your virtual hard drive? All versions of DOS and Windows up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 cannot use hard drives bigger than 137GB.

As SomeGuy says, just start over from scratch. I don't think you even need a boot disk, the Windows 98 SE ISO I use is bootable. Don't install MS-DOS first, Windows 98 already includes that, and if you want you can even set it so that only DOS boots, then when you want to run Windows you type "WIN" at the DOS prompt.

You should note that once you install Windows 98, you don't have MS-DOS 6.22 anymore, it has been upgraded to MS-DOS 7, which was not made available by itself; it's only included with Windows 95/98/Me.