FDISK Troubles

[Jim123]

I'm putting together a system for a friend with parts that I have around after 5 years of upgrading my PC and my son's PC.

I updated the BIOS and that went well, and after the BIOS is working fine, but for one thing.

I'm using a Windows 98 Fat32 emergency disk (Windows 98 2ed) floppy disk, that I've used for 5 years now (Its my lucky disk). And with it I fdisk the Hard Drives, deleting the old partitions, creating new partitions, Formating the drives etc. After the drives are Partitiond and formated as I have done in the past for a good old clean install of Windows 98 2ed.

the last thing is to let it boot using that floppy, to give you CDRom support, at this point the floppy scanes and install dos cdrom drivers, and assigns a drive letter to the cd drive.

Well this is where I'm having a problem, it gets about half way and stops, it hanging at

- Scanning PCI bus using Mechanism #2-

Never looked at it before, I've tryed moving stuff around, taking items out, nothing is working to get past this.

So thats what made me think that perhaps something went wrong with the flash and did something bad to my PCI bus.

System: no name 350 watt PS p4 ready
Jetway 993AN ver 1.2 motherboard, VIA chipset, CEL, P2, P3, (now with latest N11 BIOS)
P3 600MHz 100 Coppermine
150 mixed sdram 64 64 32 PC100 (BIOS reports 160?) I think its adding some portion of the video Ram
Asus AGP-V7100 GeForce2 MX 32NB
2 - Quantum fireball EX 6gb Drives (set as master)
Promise IDE controller card (with two IDE channels) faster then the IDE single channel on the MB
Sound Blaster Live Value
AOpen Modem

Cool stuff back when.

I'm going to be installing Windows XP Home on it, I know I don't need the 98 cdrom drivers, but I don't like the idea that I can't install Windows 98 if I had to, I don't think anything is wrong, I bet I'm forgetting somthing.

What do you think
Jim

 

[n0cmonkey]

The win98se cd is bootable.

 

[Jim123]

I remember doing it this old windows 95 way, and in its way, a method to see if everything is working.

 

[bacillus]

it's your promise ata card causing this.
check on the promise website for a workaround or first install without the promise card installed, hdd attached to the motherboard ide.

 

[kd7fhd]

Check out bacillus' answer. I think he's probably right. Remove all expansion cards (except the video of course) and see if it will start. Once you have Windows installed then add the cards back in one at a time.

 

[niall]

I reinstalled Win98SE on a new system lately, and I agree that working with drives on my IDE controller card gave problems. Plug them on the slower onboard IDE, install, and when all is fine, just switch them back to the controller card and disable onboard IDE. That should work.

 

[Jim123]

Thanks everyone, I'll do it that way

Again, thank you
Jim

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
The win98se cd is bootable.

Not the retail one.

Anyways, what's happening is one of the SCSI card ASPI drivers for DOS is hanging when probing the PCI bus for the presence of that particular SCSI card.

What I would do, is modify the Win98se boot disk, editing the CONFIG.SYS and removing all of the drivers that are not needed. In this case, if you only have an IDE CD-ROM drive like most people, then the only two drivers that you need are the OAKCDROM.SYS and the MSCDEX.EXE. You can remove the various ASPIxx.SYS and BTCDROM.SYS and FLASHPT.SYS, they are not needed unless you have the associated SCSI hardware that they are meant for.

Btw, I've been using Promise IDE controller cards (first an Ultra66, now an Ultra100 TX2), and in neither case, on many various motherboards, have I ever had that problem with the Win98se boot disk hanging.

However some mobos/chipsets/BIOSes don't like one of the two types of PCI config-space access mechanisms, and will hang. I've run into that before running WCPUID in Windows, although that could also have been something having to do with accessing it inside Windows, I'm not sure.

I would try re-creating a stripped-down Win98se boot disk, and see what happens. Post or PM if you need more specific details, I suppose I could dig out and strip down the floppy for you if you can't figure out it. (Speaking to the OP here, not n0c, of course. )

Edit: Oh yeah, going back to what n0c said, except changing it a little bit - the WinXP CD should be bootable, if you want to install WinXP that way, you could, and just pretty-much bypass the issue, although if you want to create a single FAT32 partition on your HD, greater than 32MB, then you will need to use a Win98se boot disk.