ray-woodcock

Hi. Found your message because I'm having a problem myself and was
searching for answers. Here's some info that I have learned
previously, and also some stuff I've found this morning. This
probably repeats what's been said here a million times already, but if
it's not the state of the art I'd certainly welcome comments and
suggestions (and also a fix for my own problem, which I get to at the
end of this message).

As I recall, the preferred way to install Win98, if you have the hard
disk space, is to install it from another hard drive rather than from
the CD. If you have only one hard drive, you partition it. Last time
I checked, PartitionMagic was the preferred tool for this sort of
thing; it is well worth the price for its improvements over FDISK. If
you need it once, you'll probably need it again.

I normally set up four partitions: C (PROGRAMS), D (STATIC), E
(DATA), and F (SWAP). ("Static" means unchanging.) I use F only for
the Windows swap file (adjustable through Control Panel | System |
Device Manager | Performance, and recommended to be set at some
largish minimum size, e.g., 50-100 MB) and for other temp files (e.g.,
Temporary Internet Files, moveable through IE | Tools | Internet
Options). D contains a folder called WIN98, which I copy straight
over from the WIN98 folder on the Win98 CD. D also contains drivers,
program downloads, and other stuff I have to hunt around for when I'm
doing an install. It's the first thing I copy over to a new machine.
C contains the actual Win98 installation and most of the other
programs, as installed (i.e., not in their zipped download form).

You install Win98 by running D:\Win98\Setup.exe. If you install from
D, rather than from the hard disk, then you may never again be
prompted to hunt around and reinsert the CD every time your system
senses that there has been some change in the installed hardware.
Instead, the system automatically looks for new drivers on D.
Depending on your system and how you work with your hardware, this
step can make life easier.

Also, as I recall, they recommend installing the upgrade on a clean
partition. In other words, you wipe off drive C and install from
scratch, not on top of your preexisting Win95 installation. If you
don't want to have to insert the Win95 CD to prove that you qualify
for the upgrade, you can copy some or all of the Win95 program files
to drive D too, so it will detect the previous version automatically.
That's probably overkill, unless you find yourself experimenting with
multiple reinstallation experiments over the course of many hours.

That partition scheme simplifies your backup task. You really only
need a few backups of drive C, maybe one of drive D, none of drive F,
and thus drive E becomes the only one getting a regular backup. So
your whole backup may fit on a single CD.

I say "a few" backups of C because I would recommend taking a snapshot
of the disk when you've got your bare-bones Win98 installation
complete, another when you've installed most of your safe software,
and others as you continue installing stuff that's a little riskier
and may eventually yield instability. It takes a long time to really
load up a PROGRAMS drive. No point having to do it all again and
again.

I recommend Drive Image for backups of your partitions. The whole
partition goes into one compressed file that you can swap around, save
on CD, etc.

This brings me to my own Win98 installation problem. I changed a
bunch of hardware and now have a machine that freezes during bootup.
It runs fine in Safe Mode. I uninstalled everything from Device
Manager and went through the hardware re-detection process. There are
now no conflicts in Device Manager. It booted into Normal Mode fine
when I had all the hardware items removed from Device Manager, but now
that Device Manager says everything is installed OK, the system
doesn't boot.

The best advice I found this morning was from a post last year. It
said this:

*** BEGIN EXCERPT ***

Make sure you use ALL the tips here :

Troubleshooting Windows 98 Startup Problems
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q188867
Trouble Shoot Windows 98 Startup Problems - Step by Step and more
tap F-8 repeatedly or hold CTRL Key as you reboot.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q192926
How to Perform Clean-Boot Troubleshooting for Windows 98

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q150516
Computer Hangs After Windows Logo Is Displayed at Startup

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q187602
Top Article for Windows98 - TroubleShoot

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q127970
Load Failures Listed in the Bootlog.txt File

http://www.vision4.co.uk/indexf.htm
Looks at your Win9x BOOTLOG.TXT file and calculates the time taken to
load each driver etc, in order to help in locating any cause of
lengthy
boot-up times. The displayed result can be sorted by loading duration,
filtered to show only those items with long durations or which
reported
failure, and saved to a text file. FREE ! (On homepage look for link
just below the"Search the Gemini Website" - Bootlog ****yzer CLICK
HERE"

Add this to your troubleshooting technique:

Unplug ALL external devices - reboot.

With ALL off as you mentioned in Message, boot into
Safe Mode - Device Manager - remove ALL duplicates
of any device. Remove any suspicious devices. Remove
Display Adapter, Sound Card, and so on one at a time
and reboot in between all deletions to see if a driver
was problem.

*** END EXCERPT ***

I'm taking them in reverse order because I suspect I've gone at this
problem bass-ackwards.

To begin with, I didn't find that the last recommend step helped. My
way of doing it was to remove everything from Device Manager and
reinstall drivers as Windows asked for them.

I also didn't get any clear insights from the Bootlog ****yzer
technique. The only things that failed to load were a bunch of fonts.
The ****yzer found a couple of delays in BOOTLOG.TXT, but I couldn't
tell what to make of that.

Before that, the article about Load Failures is not relevant. It
tells about logged failures that are *not* a problem. What I want is
the load failure (or whatever) that *is* a problem.

Before that, the so-called "Top Article for Windows98 - TroubleShoot"
is actually just a listing of the "Top Articles," plural. There are,
no doubt, some valuable insights in the estimated 120 articles listed
on this page, but telling someone to read them all, or try to figure
out which one will solve the problem -- well, that's not really useful
troubleshooting advice, IMHO.

Before that, and seemingly applicable to my problem, is the article
entitled, "Computer Hangs After Windows Logo Is Displayed at Startup."
It says that one option is to edit MSDOS.SYS so as to add a line
reading Logo=0 in the [Options] section. This disables the pretty
Windows 98 login screen, so you can see if some antivirus program is
stalled behind it. In my case, none is.

Two articles left to look at. The first article on the list tells you
how to hit F8 to start the computer in Safe Mode, and what to do if it
won't even start in Safe Mode. In my case, it does start in Safe
Mode. The article then offers three different boot options to
experiment with. I remembered the other article, on Clean-Boot
Troubleshooting, as being a source of a lot of hard work.

Before following the steps recommended in either of those two
articles, I just remembered that I was wrong in what I said above.
This machine contained an old ISA (not PCI) sound card, and now I
remember that the modem and sound card were the last two pieces of
hardware for which I did driver installation. I remove the sound card
and, joy, the ****er boots.

But then it doesn't boot. The only new change I made was that, just
now, in Device Manager, I noticed there were two instances of Direct
Memory Access (DMA) Controller, and one of them showed an error -- you
know, the yellow circle with the exclamation mark in it. The advice I
got was to remove them both, because Win98 would re-detect them both
on reboot. But it's not doing that. It's hanging up. Once again,
Safe Mode works. Previous posts tell me it may be a motherboard
problem, so I reinstall the mobo driver upgrades that, for all I know,
may have something to do with it: Bus Master, IRQ Routing, PCI
Bridge, and South Bridge. So far, nothing has changed in Device
Manager. On reboot, the freeze is still there.

Another guy online says his double DMA controller errors in Device
Manager were related to his video card, so I reinstall the mobo's AGP
driver upgrade in Safe Mode. That could be it; I get an error doing
that. I try his approach of setting the Display (in Device Manager)
to 640 x 480. Reboot; freeze.

I'd be happy, at this point, to have the DMA controller error back
again.

beamguy

Two suggestions...
1) boot with logging, then look in c:\bootlog.txt to see how far it got when
booting fails.
2) run msconfig and in the startup tab remove one program at a time until
you find the culprit. Then uninstall & reinstall the problem programs...

And a guess...
My experience with ADSL is that they installed quite a bit of software on
my system, including connection diagnostic packages that really only benefited
the DSL company. Since you know you have a problem there why not
uninstall that and reinstall it... You may find that it comes as about 3-4
different software packages, most of which you don't need. In fact, if you have
a router you don't need and in fact should uninstall all of it!