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Is Diskless Win98 going to be impossible?

T

TheLazy1

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Jun 2, 2009
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Along with the other inane things I'm up to, trying to run Win98SE without a hard disk is giving me the most difficulty.
So far all I've found was booting using memdisk, which is fine, and I even found a way to sync it back to the virtual machine hosting the image.

However, there seems to be some oddities which may not be able to be overcome:
- When I tested memdisk in DOS, the award flash utility could not detect the flash chip (Sort of relevant)
- When I tried to install the NVIDIA drivers in the memdisk it complained about not finding any graphics hardware despite having the correct drivers for my card

So I force-installed the graphics driver, dumped the ramdisk over the network and on booting got a configmg Windows protection error.
At this point there seems to be no hope, even if I boot into safe-mode I cannot exit to ms-dos mode to upload any modifications made to the ramdisk.

Any thoughts?
Or, is this just a complete waste of time?
 
P3-800 Running on an Asus P3V4X.
512MB PC133
GeFoce3 Ti 200

I can boot from floppy and I think I can boot from USB, I can't remember but I'll check again.
Currently it's setup to load and boot Win98 through iPXE and memdisk.

To sync the changes I use the MS network client and a memory dump utility.
 
If you can boot from floppy or USB, what's the issue?

Are you using the unofficial Win98SE SP2 patches? I find that it helps considerably on later systems. I also use HIMEMX.SYS and XMSDISK.SYS for my RAMdisk.
 
Oddly enough installing those patches would break my Windows install every time I tried.
The idea was to boot through the network but actually I never thought about trying USB.
 
Out of curiosity I installed Win98 to a real hard drive and my graphics card was detected with no problems.
My guess is that the ramdisk is loaded over top of the graphics card's address space which may explain why it's not detected, and why the ramdisk gets corrupted and unbootable after installing the drivers.
I'll have to check but that's probably the reason why it interferes with BIOS flashing utilities as well.

About Win98USB:
Should I just disable the swap all-together or just toss it on a ramdisk?
I hear Windows gets pissy if you don't have one, even if you have lots of ram.
 
If you suspect collision between your RAMdisk and video, have a look at XMSdisk--you can tell the driver to position it whereever you want within memory. My Win98 runs on a 440BX system with 1.5GB of memory (I couldn't use 2 because that leaves no space for the AGP card window)--1GB of it is RAMdisk and it works just fine.
 
It sounds like a better idea, but how can I load Windows on to the RAMdisk on each boot?
I would need a method that's compatible with MS Networking and supports long filenames, so far every attempt has horribly mangled them.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you suspect collision between your RAMdisk and video, have a look at XMSdisk--you can tell the driver to position it whereever you want within memory. My Win98 runs on a 440BX system with 1.5GB of memory (I couldn't use 2 because that leaves no space for the AGP card window)--1GB of it is RAMdisk and it works just fine.
Click to expand...

I've tried this but Windows barfed big time, how are you copying to the RAMdisk or what is your setup?
Even over a gigabit link unzipping Windows took a fair bit of time.
 
I start DOS, let it do the setup, then WIN. Seems to work fine when I need it, but I also have Win XP and Debian on the same machine, so 98SE gets used mostly for DOS applications.
 
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