Can anyone help me with my broken computer?

[EZ_Xanthousjoe]

Hey guys, I posted here probably about a week ago, asking about hard drive partitioning because I was going to go ahead and reformat in the near future. Well, it turns out that I did reformat, and now my computer's doing a number of bad things:
1) I can't play Unreal Tournament anymore using the direct3d graphics stuff, I have to use software rendering, which is irritating.
2) When I try to run dxdiag, my computer likes to crash a lot
3) Windows Media Player doesn't even work, when I click the icon it says, "An Internal Application Error Has Occurred."
4) Each time I quit the Steam program (used for CounterStrike), it gives me one of those hobag illegal operation errors.
I'm currently running Windows 98 Second Edition, on a 1 ghz athlon with 640 megs of pc133 RAM, and an NVidia GEForce2 mx 200 w/64 megs of memory. Yeah, it's old, don't laugh at me!
Just in case someone can tell me where I went wrong, when I was reformatting, I made a startup disk, started up with it, ran fdisk, removed my partitions, created a 50% primary partition, a 50% extended partition, rebooted, typed format c:, rebooted again, made a directory c win98\cabs, went there and typed copy G win98, then ran setup. I did a typical install of windows because I'm lazy, and then immediately installed my motherboard drivers, followed by my network card, then went online and downloaded the latest motherboard drivers and installed them as well. Then I moved to my graphics card drivers, installed those, and then downloaded the latest drivers from nvidia.com. I also installed directx 8.0 from the cd with my graphics card drivers on it, but didn't upgrade to 9.0b (or whatever that one is), because I thought perhaps that was what was causing the trouble. Anyway, that's about all I can think of, hehe, sorry for the long post. I hope someone can help, and if you can't, thanks for your time anyway. =)

Joe Edited by: Xanthousjoe at: 11/23/03 8:02 pm

[EZ_Lindianae]

First thing I see is that you have too much memory. Win98 doesn't support more than 512 meg. If you want to use that much you need to move to XP or 2K.

[EZ_Durden]

Quote:I made a startup disk, started up with it, ran fdisk, removed my partitions, created a 50% primary partition, a 50% extended partition, rebooted, typed format c:, rebooted again

Surprised that it worked at all. If I remember correctly, shouldn't you have done a "format C: /sys" to copy all system files from the floppy to the hard disk. Also, did you format the D drive/partition?

Sounds like a some of the Win98 drivers were corrupted on your set up.

I thought Win98 would support over 512Mb Ram, but it just didn't utilize it efficiently.

[EZ_Xanthousjoe]

Yea, I formatted d as well, after my first reformat. I've gone through this process about 3 or 4 times in the past week, always with no luck. I'm not sure about the /sys thing at all, but you could be right. I really don't know much about what I'm doing, but I've done it successfully in the past.

[EZ_Diziet Asahi]

i don't know if it is related to you problems, but copying from the CD to the HD to start the install process doesn't seem right to me.

What i'd do is to get a boot disk with your CDrom driver loaded on it, or use the one that came with win98, it has some generic drivers on it, partition/format, and then start the install directly from the CD. You can find some good multipurpose bootdisks at bootdisk.com.

[Biggwin]

I had always copied my win98 cd to my hd before doing in install... saved me from later having to edit the registry to point to the cab files

I usually booted off a floppy then did a fdisk. Then I would turn off the machine and then boot it that time with cd support. I would format the hd then make a win98 dir in the freshly formated hd. I would then copy all the files to that directory, eject the cd and start the install from the hard drive.

Yes win98 will run with more than 512 mb of memory but sometimes it REALLY doesnt like to. Personally I never ran a 98 machine with more than 512. There are actually some steps you can take that make it not care that it has more than that installed but it is just as easy to pull out the extra.

[Biggwin]

I am guessing you had problems before you reformated. I would really look for either heat or memory problems.

You can download some memory testors for free and they should be able to eliminate that issue. I would pull out 128mb though.

[EZ_Xanthousjoe]

Yeah, it looks like it was that extra 128 megs that were causing the problem. Thanks guys =)