Can't install win98 on Emachine.

Problem

I jus bought a new emachine

2.60 gig Pent 4
256 ddr
dvd-rom and dvd-r
80 gig hdd

Had XP on large 80 gig hdd, and I wanted 3 partitions,
so put in fdisk and made them..format all the partitions.
Put in win98 cdrom and reboot...boots from cd, starts install, loads files gets
to the restart part,

Now when it restarts it comes up on a black screen
"please wait while setup updates your configuation files"
"this could take a few minutes"

"completed updating files"

---the screen goes black for 4-5 minutes then

on a blue screen "disk write error"
"unable to write to drive c:"
"data or files may be lost"
"press any key"

--press a key

on blue screen
"a Fatal Exception 0E has occured at
0167:BFF86EAC"
"the current application will be terminated"

and there I am stuck...if I reboot and "boot from hard drive" I get..
"While initilizating device IS0
"Error: an I/O subsystem driver failed to load
"either a file in the .\iosubsys subdirectory is corrupt or system is low on memory"



I thought it was the cd (WIn98SE) so I tried plain old Win98 and got the same thing.
Win 95 started to install and came up with
Error- S0-0013...it just would not work at all.

So I tried XP...which was on it in the first place..no problemo...worked great.
Reformated the c: drive again and tried 98 same problem.

I need to get 98 on this machine as asome of my apps work much better than in xp.
and I want it to dual boot, but I need 98 on first right??

Is there some hitch installing win98 on a high end machine like this??

 

check the format on the hard drive.. fdisk it and make sure you have a fat32 partition..

 

It's a little beyond me, but the I.T. guys at my work told me the same thing about 6 months ago when they tried to load Win98SE on a brand new DELL laptop...general protection faults & other errors. The newest hardware out there apparently doesn't support anything other than NT based operating systems...hopefully someone here can point us to a way around this...

 

More than likely RAM, using PC100/133 SDRAM, a person could go up to 1GB RAM using Windows98se no problem but DDR SDRAM does something funny to 98SE...even if it works ok, it works stable mostly up to a total of 512MB DDR SDRAM...
Remember If your BIOS is up-to-date and the Windows CD is authentic and in good condition, the only other (and more than likely) cause for Windows Installation problems is RAM!

But also remember this, even though it is possible to create FAT32 partition over 32GB, for Windows9x and ME it is not good. Also do an unconditional format after you FDISK'ed and rebooted (every time FDISK is used a reboot afterwards is necessary). Try a smaller HD too something like 40GB or less and see what happens...

 

Thanks guys...thats some of the better advice so far...it was my theroy from the first that the newer machine will not take win98.

 

Did you delete all ntfs partitions b4 install?

you probably know this but for anyone else this is a nice guide for formatting and partitioning for fat32, find it here

also for support of ddr ram over 512MB in win 98 there is a work around for this, but I have found the UNOFFICIAL Windows98 Second Edition Service Pack 1 1.6.2 to be very nice many little fixes like a much faster defrag and the higher ddram support

I had 1 win 98 machine that was finnicky put in the win xp disk and booted from it only to delete all partitions than reinstalled with Win98

 

I found the problem and thought I would share for the data base.

The original Fdisk accompanying Win98 can't partition HDrives larger than 64GB. Unless you pay close attention when partitioning this may not be apparent. Unfortunately you will need to redo the partitioning using the version of Fdisk capable of handling disks larger than 64GB. When using the new version of Fsisk to delete the existing partitions you may have trouble deleting them. If you do, use Delpart to delete and then Fdisk to create. Find both programs here: http://radified.com/Files/

 

I'm Just woundering, what apps are you running that work better on 98 than XP?

 

If you right-click on the .exe or the shortcut and select properties, under the compatibility tab, you can select to run a program under conditions from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. Run them under Win98 mode before downgrading your OS.

 

I use DOS based Cadd and co-or geometry programs...I use xp more than 98...i dual boot.