MSDOS Freezes, Hanging

[NaokiS]

Hi all. New here so first of all, greeetings!

I have an old Pentium machine with a Gigabyte GA586-HX mobo that I've been working on for several days now to have DOS/Win98 and Win 2K to dual boot with altough I keep hitting snags and stops. Currently I have DOS 7.1 with Win98 installed on top of it  on a 4GB FAT partition on an 8GB IDE drive with an Iomega Zip250. The computer has 80MB of RAM which I intend to upgrade later on, a Trident V3 PCI VGA card and a Soundblaster AWE32. The problem I keep getting is just a myriad of random freezes or hangs, mainly when loading certain software up such as Lemmings 2. It will get passed the memory check and then hang. Keyboard lights respond but nothing happens after. Space Quest 3 will load to a mouse cursor which I can move but again hangs and does nothing else. Copying  a large batch of files or just big files can sometimes cause the DOS prompt to hang however its always on certain files when you do so, copying individually works fine. In Windows I practically have no issues, just a slight delay when traversing through folders on any drive. Other than that its not had any issues. When I tried to install Windows 2K to test further, the installer would black screen after saying "Starting Windows 2000". Pressing F5 to set to Standard PC made no difference.

I've tried to test several things such as:

• ScanDisk on all drives including surface scanning
• Low level fat format within DOS
• Different hard drives
• Reinstalling all of DOS, Win98 in different orders
• Replacing the CMOS battery and checking settings

I havent yet checked the RAM or fully checked things like the AWE32's IRQ or Address altough I know they are different to factory but I'm wondering if there is something else I should try or whether someone has suggestions? Its a shame as its for using older equipment of mine and this legacy isnt my speciality 

Thanks for your time!

[BC_Programmer]

on a 4GB FAT partition

FAT16 or FAT32?

If FAT16, cluster sizes larger than 32K can cause problems in "pure" MS-DOS and for MS-DOS Applications.

If FAT32, FAT32 can cause problems in "pure" MS-DOS as well, Even if you have MS-DOS 7.1 (which I should mention isn't "legitimate"- it's a hacked release ripped out of Windows 98SE)

You can eliminate that as the possible culprit but using a separate partition for MS-DOS altogether, a <2GB FAT16 partition for MS-DOS and a FAT32 partition for Windows 98.

[DaveLembke]

I'd run memtest86 if you can get it to boot off of a CD. 80MB RAM means you have mismatched capacity and maybe even brand and latency etc. You might find that the issues are in a RAM stick or pair of RAM sticks that dont play well with others, meaning you might be dropping your RAM to 64MB to get it to behave until you get more RAM that is compatible with already existing RAM or a new used good set of RAM for greater than 64MB.

I ran into problems like your having years ago with a 486 and 24MB RAM. I stuffed as much RAM as I could into it and come to find out with 8MB - 8MB - 4MB - 4MB sticks in the memory slots one of the 4MB sticks had and issue, so I had to drop it to 20MB until I got two more used off of ebay 8MB sticks that were same latency as the 8MB sticks I already had to bring it to 32MB. I had where Windows 95 would behave for the most part, but games would randomly hang and crash. Not sure if this is because Windows 95 was using mainly the 8MB sticks and the games ran into the upper memory where the 4MB sticks were in slots 2 and 3 where 8MB sticks were in slots 0 and 1, if memory placement even matters in controlling where an OS loads to vs games etc. It might be that RAM is evenly used among all 4 slots vs loading up from the beginning of slot 0 working its way up to slot 3 etc. Never researched that. However more than once a troubled stick in the tail end slots seems to be detected later vs sooner which might just be coincidence or maybe memory is loaded in order from lower to upper memory address vs whatever address is next available.

[NaokiS]

FAT16 or FAT32?

If FAT16, cluster sizes larger than 32K can cause problems in "pure" MS-DOS and for MS-DOS Applications.

If FAT32, FAT32 can cause problems in "pure" MS-DOS as well, Even if you have MS-DOS 7.1 (which I should mention isn't "legitimate"- it's a hacked release ripped out of Windows 98SE)

You can eliminate that as the possible culprit but using a separate partition for MS-DOS altogether, a <2GB FAT16 partition for MS-DOS and a FAT32 partition for Windows 98.

That's a good point. I follow LGR on youtube and he mentions all the time about only being able to use 2GB for DOS partitions. I'll have to check the file format, I'm thinking that it might be FAT32 now.

I'd run memtest86 if you can get it to boot off of a CD. 80MB RAM means you have mismatched capacity and maybe even brand and latency etc. You might find that the issues are in a RAM stick or pair of RAM sticks that dont play well with others, meaning you might be dropping your RAM to 64MB to get it to behave until you get more RAM that is compatible with already existing RAM or a new used good set of RAM for greater than 64MB.

I ran into problems like your having years ago with a 486 and 24MB RAM. I stuffed as much RAM as I could into it and come to find out with 8MB - 8MB - 4MB - 4MB sticks in the memory slots one of the 4MB sticks had and issue, so I had to drop it to 20MB until I got two more used off of ebay 8MB sticks that were same latency as the 8MB sticks I already had to bring it to 32MB.

I'll investigate that too. The memory did strike me as an odd size so might have to hold for some matched pair of SIMMs.

Thanks for the responses, will try them out!