Win98se Locksup on Splash Screen

[ciperlinux]

Hey all,
Newbie here. I installed a new Harddrive into an older pentium II pc. First off, it only recognized 8GB of the 40GB, any ideas on fixing this? Second, i FDISK'd and formatted it anyways at 8GB. Win98se installed, but on the reboot it locksup on the startup splash screen? I just installed it, it can't have bugs already, can it?

thanks

 

[ciperlinux]

RAM or VID card

Someone here mentioned it could be the RAM or video card, could this be the cae?

 

[poertner_1274]

It could be your ram, if it is having problems. Try removing each stick and putting 1 more in at a time to see if it works. Also try reseating everything, someting could have wiggled out.

BTW :wave: Welcome to TechSpot :wave:

 

[Rick]

The 8GB barrier is a limitation with older systems and there are a couple of work arounds.

FIRST, MAKE SURE YOU ARE ENABLING "LARGE DISK SUPPORT" WHEN USING FDISK. It should prompt you for this and you should choose YES.

1.) Flash your BIOS to the latest revision. Your board manfacturer should have the latest BIOS available for download. This is recommended only if you understand the consequences.

2.) Use drive installation utilities to break the 8GB barrier. WD & Maxtor always come with drive installation tools which "trick" the BIOS into recognizing the whole drive.

3.) Purchase a PCI UDMA controller. This is a PCI card that adds additional IDE channels to your computer. The card works independantly from the BIOS, meaning it can address larger sizes even if your computer does not support it.


Something else to consider is that once you break the 8GB barrier, then you have to find a way to get past the 32GB barrier. LoL. You really should not have installed such a large drive in such an old system. Hopefully doing the above will also get you past 32GB as well.

The next one after that is 137GB, so you shouldn't have to worry about that one.

As for your Windows 98 locking up, it could be due to your drive not being properly installed. It could also have something to do with MANY MANY different things. Can you give us some more information? How about safe mode.. Does it boot into safe mode?

 

[cipherlinux]

Here's what i've completed.

I've taken a piece of PC100 RAM that works in my other pc, and removed all the RAM from the broken PC. Then I put the RAM in each slot and booted it up. It still locks up on the startup splash screen.

Just for kicks,
I put my Voodoo3 that i had laying around, that worked (in terms of video) and still locked up at the splash screen.

I'm confused!!!!! If theirs any info you are looking for in particular, please let me know. I would really like to know what caused the freeze up.

thanks

 

[cipherlinux]

Win2K

okay,
Since i couldn't get the pc to stop locking up at the startup screen, i took a different approach.

I took the RAM, HDD, Vid card out of the pc that locks up and put it into my second pc. Installed Win2K and everything worked fine, RAM included. So i put the HDD, RAM, vid card back in the other pc. Guess what, it DOESN'T lock up. Yeah, now it's an infinite loop of rebooting. It goes past the BIOS, the windows 2000 loading bar (The horizontal bar along the bottom when win2k loads) the reboots.

Any ideas? BIOS update? if so, how does one "Flash" the BIOS?

thanks

 

[Rick]

Windows 2000 CANNOT be transferred to another system like that. It has to be installed the computer you are using it in or it will blue screen on bootup (this is what is causing your infinte loop).

What you will need to do is a repair of Windows 2000 using your bootable CD.

 

[cipherlinux]

thanks, I'll try that tonight

thanks, i'll try that tonight