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Win 98 Freezes on Install

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by sscncs

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On 7/5, I installed a brand new Elitegroup 2.20GHz Pentium 4 main board. I have been using Win 2000 flawlessly ever since. On 9/8 everything froze and would not respond. Attempts to restart caused a hang at the Win 2000 loading screen. Finding the partition with only 7% free and badly fragmented, I decided to purchase a new Western Digital 60GB,IDE(ATA-100)hard drive and partitioned it with 20GB/40GB. Because the Win 2000 I have is an upgrade, I have always had to start by installing Win 98, then Win 2000. Many installs like this in the past have gone fine. When I start with the Win 98 boot/startup floppy and tell it to install with CD support, it always hangs at the Oak Technology OTI-91X ATAPI CD-ROM driver install point. I tried severalfloppys including a back-up start-up disk recently made, booting directly from the CD, swapping CD-ROMS, using the old, [wiped-clean and reformatted] HD only, switching in/out the ram sticks: All hang at the same install point. The system also has 1X 128 + 1 X 256 [384] MB RAM, a Maxtor 13.6 GB hard drive, a Logitech Wireless Mouse and Keyboard, a ATI All-In-1 Wonder Pro 128 Graphics Card w/capture and tuner, a Creative Extigy Sound card w/external control unit and IR Remote, a 3.5",1.44MB,Floppy Drive, a Yamaha CRW2100EZ CDRW Rewritable drive, a generic IBM CD-ROM, a Iomega Zip100 external Zip Drive w/ZipZoom SCSI internal card, a 56KB V.90 Modem, Dell 17" Monitor, Altec Lansing AVS500 5.1 Speakers and an Epson Perfection 1250 Photo USB Scanner. When trying the install, I unhooked all of the above external peripherals except the monitor. Unless it can get the CD driver in, there is no hope of eventually getting Win 2K back.

8 replies

by thechas

First, are you sure that you need to have W98 installed first?
The reason I ask, is that with both the W98SE and Win XP upgrade versions, you only need to have the old operating system CD on hand and swap CDs during the setup process to prove you qualify for the upgrade version.
You should be able to boot from the W2K CD, and install W2K directly.

Second, does your motherboard use DDR or RDRAM?
If the board has an Intel chipset, and uses RDRAM, it is best practice (and possibly required) that both DIMMs be of the same size, and even the same manufactures lot.
Why? Intel designed the P4 to "interleave" the memory between the 2 DIMMs to both increase speed, and data integrity.

Third, I have seen W98 be very picky about devices and drivers.
I always set up a W98 box with just the drives and video card.
I install the chipset drivers before adding any additional hardware or software.
After W98 is installed and functioning properly, I add in other devices one at a time. With are-boot in between each shutdown to assure that the latest device is fully installed.

4th, if all else fails, install the boot drive on another PC, and copy the W98 CD onto the drive. (I use C:\Windows\Options)
Then, boot from a floppy, and switch over to the folder with the CD files, and run setup from there.
I also copy the extracted files for the device drivers so that I don't need any CD's while installing Windows.

Chas

by sscncs

To: 'The Chas'
Thank you for your helpful suggestions. To add some info...First, I have Win98 [original]; not SE. The Win2000 upgrade has never worked free-standing unless the old OS is already there. And, when I tried to boot from the Win2k CD, when it tried to install the Oak Tech drivers, the system hung in the same place. Second, I tried the install with only the RAM chip that came with the new P4 board; leaving the stick from the old board out... same result. I will try your third idea...I had not removed all of the cards that worked with the peripherals. If this yields the same result, I'll try the fourth idea of pre-loading the drive on another system. Thanks.

by opatzg9

One more point to ponder, when setting up win98 and fdisking... did you use fat 32 (NOT NTFS)? Also win98 can only handle 32 gig of disk space, I don't think 40gig is exceptable with fat 32 in a win98 environment. So my recommendation would be to go to 2 30 gig partitions using fat 32. Then see if the cd rom driver would work. As chas stated start with just the basics inthe pc and add the additional hardware after you getthe operating system up and running. that should minimize conflicts and driver problems.
Good luck

by sscncs

Changing the partitions to 30-30 did the trick. Ultimately, it was a bad memory slot that caused the original freezing.

by sscncs

Success on the most recent suggestion... I took out all the cards except the video, the RAM stick that came with the P4 board, and one CD-ROM. I re-ran the board CMOS set-up to partition for 30GB/30GB at FAT32. The install of Win98 went in fine... so that may answer one of the two likely problems. But, after restarting to Win98, all runs OK for about 1-4 minutes and then things hang or I get an automatic restart to win 98 Safe Mode. Any attempt to restart yields the same sequence. The main board is only 2 months old and is still under warranty. A phone call to Elitegroup... they say "send the main board back and we'll replace it". Perhaps this is the next logical step?

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