Win98SE intall halts: Needs at least 16MB of memory

[FlailingUser]

Hello All:
Complete newbie here needs a bit of advice. First, I installed FreeDOS and then followed the instructions here http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9918 to copy the install cd for win98se onto my virtual hard disk. Next I ran the command setup /p j. Everything seemed to be progressing nicely but then I got a dialog box saying "Stop Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16MB of memory". I currently have the guest configured for 128MB so I'm not sure what the problem might be. Anyone have a suggestion?
Thanks in advance,
Jim

[fixedwheel]

dialog box saying "Stop Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16MB of memory". I currently have the guest configured for 128MB

128MB was more than imaginable in those days, i guess it can't count up to that value ... give 32MB

[FlailingUser]

Thanks for the suggestion. Just tried it at 32MB and got the same issue. Any other ideas?
Cheers,
Jim

[Perryg]

If memory serves me the error "Stop Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16MB of memory" was somewhat misleading way back when. I think it had more to do with the way the partition and format was done. Even way back then MS looked at the MBR to see what was going on and certain hardware checks. Try typing setup /? to see what the parameters were and use the switch that ignores the check. See if that gets you farther.

[FlailingUser]

Thanks Perryg this seems really promising but it didn't work (yet). The key for skipping the memory check is /im. I wonder if I have a synatax issue. The command I am using was setup /p j so I added the im and tried
setup /p j im
and I also tried
setup /p j /im
Any further suggestion? Syntax?
Thanks,
Jim

[Perryg]

OK so what is the j switch that you are trying to pass at setup "p j" ?
Have you tried if without the switch?

[FlailingUser]

According to the tutorial here http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9918 that is to force ACPI support to be installed. I did try it (accidentally) without that and got about 100 files that needed to be fixed.
Any other ideas?
EDIT: Okay I am trying again with the command setup /im and this time it made it past all the file fixes. Bizarre. Nonetheless it still gave me the same stop message. Arrrggg!!!!

OK so what is the j switch that you are trying to pass at setup "p j" ?
Have you tried if without the switch?

[Perryg]

Funny how we forget. No I have no more ideas. I installed 98 sometime ago for nostalgia. I did not run into any issues myself, but I have the Windows 98 boot/install disk. Maybe it has something to do with using freedos.

[FlailingUser]

Funny how we forget. No I have no more ideas. I installed 98 sometime ago for nostalgia. I did not run into any issues myself, but I have the Windows 98 boot/install disk. Maybe it has something to do with using freedos.

Okay, thanks for the help. Maybe I'll try installing Win98 1st edition and see how that goes.
Cheers,
Jim

[mpack]

You should not have needed to install DOS in order to install Win98SE. The DOS thing was something you needed before bootable CDs, and Win98SE came on a bootable setup CD. If you try to run it from DOS instead then it will be running in real mode (16 bit - only 1MB of addressable memory), which is probably what the installer is complaining about.

As to the tutorial: I assume that the CD is in fact bootable, but you are trying to run the setup program from the command line because of that ACPI trick. ISTR having similar trouble when I attempted to follow the tutorial, and I did find a solution, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was! Possibly it's as simple as installing an extended memory manager in DOS.

Off the top of my head, what I can think of trying is preparing my own CD image in which the "/p j" thing is in the autorun.inf. Like I say, this is off the top of my head and represents what I would try first. I don't know if its actually possible.

Edit:  I just had a read of the "setup.txt" file on the Win98 setup cd, which contains tips on installation. It seems that installing from DOS is possible, but it does mention the need to a line "device=<path>\himem.sys" in your CONFIG.SYS file, where <path> is a path to wherever your himem.sys file is located (it came with later DOS versions).

[mpack]

Further on the above: I just tried a Win98SE installation, starting from a DOS 6.22 installation. The DOS installation used a 512MB IDE hard disk (*), a working CD-ROM driver was installed.

(*) From memory, DOS had a 540MB drive size limit, so I would not make a DOS drive larger than 512MB. Once Win98SE is installed you can convert the drive to FAT32 and then use CloneVDI to enlarge the drive if you need it larger.

The CONFIG.SYS file included the lines :-

Code: Select all

device=c:\dos\himem.sys
dos=high,umb
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe NOEMS
devicehigh=c:\cdrom\oakcdrom.sys /D:CD001
files=30
stacks=0,0
buffers=20

The AUTOEXEC.BAT file included these lines :-

Code: Select all

@echo off
path=c:\dos
lh c:\dos\mscdex.exe /D:CD001
rem lh c:\djbin\keyb UK
prompt $p$g

As you did, I copied the Win98 setup files off the cd, then I ran "setup /p j" from the command line. The installation seems to have worked perfectly.

You are starting from FreeDOS rather than DOS 6.22. I have not tried that and don't know if it will work. It may also require slight changes in CONFIG.SYS syntax.

[mpack]

I also just tried installing over FreeDOS. It did not work for me. The Win98 setup program pre-install checks found problems in several disk folders, and then crashed with an illegal instruction once installation proper started.

[Perryg]

OK I remember now.

You can't install FreeDOS to the hard drive but you can use it to boot, partition, and format the drive. ( I used format /s to include the system files). After that you manually need to install the cd drivers and fix your config.sys and autoexec.bat to include the drivers and boot the guest to the hard drive. Run setup from the Windows CD.

[mark rumsey]

When installing Win98, it needs the extended memory driver (himem.sys) to be loaded so that it can access the memory above 1mb. When it starts up from a bootable CD it does this automatically, but if you are installing DOS first (including DOS supplied as part of Win98) you must make sure that himem.sys (or its equivalent) is loaded. It is also worth loading smartdrv.sys to speed up the installation.

The maximum amount of memory Windows 98 can use is approximately 780mb. Any more than this and it runs out of space in its file cache to hold the allocation tables and won't start up. If there is more than this installed (e.g. 1GB) you can hack the ini fils to limit memory usage to get it to boot. However, there is an absolute limit of 3GB as Windows 98 (and 95) use the address space between 3-4GB for its own purposes and if physical memory exists in this space Windows cannot run, even with the ini file limits in place. For this reason I limit memory to 768mb in my Win 95 and Win 98 VMs. In fact, with Win 95 its not even worth allocating anything like that much as nothing that runs under 95 can make use of it, so I stick with 128mb.

Windows 95 and 98 have problems with certain AMD processors. Windows 95 has an issue with AMD K6 processors onwards where a glitch in the code crashes out the file system. There is a patch (which I think is still downloadable from Microsoft) to overcome this, but it can be difficult to apply. Windows 98 has an issue with AMD Phenom processors. A couple of instructions used during the install routine have either vanished from the processor or give unexpected results, causing the install to freeze or crash. There is no workaround for this. At least, these problems cannot be worked around simply when installing directly onto hardware, but when installing into a Virtualbox VM it is easy. During the install, disable hardware virtualisation in the VM and the install will go without a hitch even if you have one of the affected processors. Once Windows 95 is installed and running, apply the patch and you can reinstate hardware virtualisation. With Windows 98, the affected instruction will never be used again, so it is safe to turn hardware virtualisation back on.

DOS FAT16 partitions are limited to about 540mb. This is only a problem if you have a FAT16 DOS such as MS-DOS 6.22. If you use a FAT32 DOS such as the DOS underlying Windows 98, you can use parritions up to 8gb if memory serves.

[ghr]

DOS 6 partitions are limited to 2 GB assuming that you have a modern BIOS (and yes, a VirtualBox VM has a modern one).