Windows ME stuck at black screen when restarting after finishing setup

[Mario Rosso]

When I finish Windows ME setup, gets stuck to the black screen with a blinking cursor and doesn't restart. What do I do now?

[BillG]

That is odd. I have never had any problems with WinME.

How much memory did you allocate? How big is the virtual hard drive?

WinME.PNG (33.49 KiB) Viewed 2928 times

[Mario Rosso]

I gave 512 MB of RAM and 10 GB of virtual hard drive.

[jorgensen]

You can try this - should work with Windows ME as well.

[Mario Rosso]

But is for Windows 98

[scottgus1]

ME is only 98 with more eye candy and bugs. Maybe the tutorial will still work? Also see viewtopic.php?t=9918, which includes ME.

[Mario Rosso]

I used setup /p j but didn't work...

[pt58]

If your host PC has a 12th gen Intel CPU or newer then its likely you will need to apply the patcher9x mentioned in the tutorial.
My Win ME VM runs fine on my laptop, which has an 8th gen Intel i7, but the same VM copied to my desktop PC which has an intel 12th Gen i5 CPU failed to boot until I applied the patcher9x. Then everything ran fine.
I'm not sure if the same problem oocurs on recent AMD Ryzen CPUs.

[Mario Rosso]

Nothing to do, still getting stuck at the same screen once I click Restart Now at the last phase. Maybe when there will be a new version of VirtualBox will work...

[scottgus1]

Mario, did you read pt58's post above your last? You don't seem to respond to it.

[Mario Rosso]

pt58, still getting stuck at the same screen once I click Restart Now at the last phase

[scottgus1]

Please explain exactly, step by step, how you implemented pt58's suggestion to apply the Patcher. Exact steps, not just "I applied the patch". Maybe someone can see what went wrong.

BTW, repeats of a post asking for a different version of Virtualbox won't get the problem solved, will get deleted, and may get further action taken. Let's not keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting something different to happen. FWIW ME is not a supported Virtualbox guest, so no further attempts to develop Virtualbox to run ME will be taken.

[Mario Rosso]

First of all I created the machine, then chose Microsoft Windows and Windows ME, then set the RAM to 512MB, then set 10GB of hard disk (but the site saied 5GB), I set the boot order to Floppy, Hard Disk, Optical, I set Video Memory to 64MB, then I put the floppy file and the WinME iso. At boot I typed fdisk.exe (pressed Y, 1, 1, Y, ESC, ESC) and I restarted, typed format.exe C:, after formatting I typed D:\setup.exe /p j /nm /ie. When started the 2nd phase, I reinserted the floppy. When restart again, I typed patch9x.exe, I pressed ENTER, ENTER again and Y, and ENTER. Then I removed the floppy at 3rd phase still gets stuck at black screen with blinking cursor after the last phase when restarted Updating System Settings...

[jorgensen]

The patching is first done on the 3rd phase!
The pathing can also be done after the final Windows setup by booting with the pathing floppy - further reading: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x/
The Windows Me disc could be faulty and another version might work - link

[Mario Rosso]

So when it gets stuck, I must insert the floppy and reset the machine and apply the patch?