I found my old XP PC to try Win 98 on it (I want to play some old games, they don't work in virtual PC), turns out I already installed it. However it would freeze as it was going to desktop.
In safe mode it seemed fine (the mouse randomly stopped working once), but if I did anything as crazy as apply the time or search for display drivers in normal boot, it would freeze, maybe temporarily but then permanently a few seconds later. Sometimes a BSOD came up saying it's unstable or:
"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 015F:BFF9DBA7."
Scandisk found nothing, RAM is fine (I've tried 512MB and 1GB), so I tried reinstalling Windows 98. It wouldn't let me do it from the hard drive's Win 98 folder (in safe mode), something about "conventional memory". So I did it booting from disk.
It installed mostly fine, but now it freezes when doing the final touches. There's a list of things it's setting up, and it always freezes at 'Programs on the Start menu' after 'Control Panel'.
So I went into safe mode, it goes straight to desktop. I was suspicious of my GPU (8800 GT) being too futuristic and turned hardware acceleration down. Now it goes past 'Programs on the Start menu' but freezes further down at 'Web TV for Windows'.
Notably, if I don't have the Windows CD in, it will still go through that final process but at 'Web TV for Windows' it will ask for the CD, then freeze as soon as I put it in and click 'ok'.
I had a Windows 2000 disk so tried that, but it won't boot from the CD drive, I guess it wants to finish the Windows 98 setup.
Also the PSU is Antec Earthwatts 550W.
The motherboard (Asus P5N-E SLI) doesn't have onboard graphics and I don't have a spare so can't test that yet. I might need a different GPU anyway for the game, but worth asking if anyone else has ideas or can confirm.
Given my GPU is 512MB VRAM, could that be it? Googling threw up some people saying 256MB is the max for Win 98(?)
Good luck.
In safe mode it seemed fine (the mouse randomly stopped working once), but if I did anything as crazy as apply the time or search for display drivers in normal boot, it would freeze, maybe temporarily but then permanently a few seconds later. Sometimes a BSOD came up saying it's unstable or:
"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 015F:BFF9DBA7."
Scandisk found nothing, RAM is fine (I've tried 512MB and 1GB), so I tried reinstalling Windows 98. It wouldn't let me do it from the hard drive's Win 98 folder (in safe mode), something about "conventional memory". So I did it booting from disk.
It installed mostly fine, but now it freezes when doing the final touches. There's a list of things it's setting up, and it always freezes at 'Programs on the Start menu' after 'Control Panel'.
So I went into safe mode, it goes straight to desktop. I was suspicious of my GPU (8800 GT) being too futuristic and turned hardware acceleration down. Now it goes past 'Programs on the Start menu' but freezes further down at 'Web TV for Windows'.
Notably, if I don't have the Windows CD in, it will still go through that final process but at 'Web TV for Windows' it will ask for the CD, then freeze as soon as I put it in and click 'ok'.
I had a Windows 2000 disk so tried that, but it won't boot from the CD drive, I guess it wants to finish the Windows 98 setup.
Also the PSU is Antec Earthwatts 550W.
The motherboard (Asus P5N-E SLI) doesn't have onboard graphics and I don't have a spare so can't test that yet. I might need a different GPU anyway for the game, but worth asking if anyone else has ideas or can confirm.
Given my GPU is 512MB VRAM, could that be it? Googling threw up some people saying 256MB is the max for Win 98(?)
Good luck.
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