Uncreative Labs

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

It started simply. My wife wanted to open her database file and Access from
office 200o would bot work,. During suffling od thingsa I has mospaced the cd key.
I searched and tried several KEYFINDERS and none seemed to work.
We typically put the originals in a 5.25" floppy case and use a copy ( fewer scratches) I uased the cd key I had written on the copy and it worked for cd #1, but not for cd#2 strange. I was unable to complete the install.

Continuing to try, I reboot4ed and 3 files from win 98 " were not found"
trange the location was 0\himem.sys and 0\dbllebuff.sys and another.

what I had to finally do is temp install the 120g drive in a second drive in another system with a "plain vanilla" copy of 98. I could not get into windows in the troubles system

I reformatted c: and reinstalled and so far X (crossed fingers) but a 24hiour digital hell.
============
meanwhile this system could not find Himem.sys. I copied it from a boot floppy from anywhere himem.sys could go. and reinstalled 98.
later same erroir., put 98 on an old - very old quantum 1g hard drive and the install only "lost" one .dll file which i replaced so far we are up and runni0ng here.
WHY ME.

nopw the 700meg caviar is going clock click
and it is the drive I trusted with the only copi4es of files I am copying from where I am restoring.

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 6:53 pm

Windows 98 and FAT32 don't play nice with extremely large drives. Any more than about 30 gig or so, and I wouldn't bother with 98. You may want to see if you can snatch a more recent version of Windows for a good price somewhere.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

hate to say a cliche but been there dome that.
when we put the 120g drive on the 1st system it qwasn't even recognized. think the system bios limit was 60gigs. used the newer fdisk also.
after we got a promise ata133 tx2 controller. it worked.
fdisked to 2-60g c formatted to 25g d formatted to 59g
I worried about the what happens when she goes beyond 25g?
I re-fdisaked it to 3-40g partitions and all has been well for 3+ years
EXCEPT win 98se requires a "refresh": about every year.

this time access from office 2000 stopped working.
requring a long delayed reformat and re-install.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Win98 also has a bug where the OS is unstable or doesn't work at all if you have over 512MB of RAM in it, did you upgrade the RAM as well as the HD?

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

Unknown_K wrote:

Win98 also has a bug where the OS is unstable or doesn't work at all if you have over 512MB of RAM in it, did you upgrade the RAM as well as the HD?

Ain't that the truth. I upgraded the GEM early last year to a 1GHz PIII and 512MB of RAM, and I'll be darned if the thing was not the most responsive computer I ever used, but it did not mean crap since it seemed programs were crashing twice as often as they used to. I had to upgrade to 2000, and I'm glad I did, the only refreshes I've had to do were because I did something stupid.

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

I wonder why that is?

You'd think the increased ram wouldn't cause that much of a problem... Maybe it's something to do with 98's process scheduling and page filing?