Windows 98SE and RAM limitations?

[Donald2B 0]

I am running a dual boot machine for some time now and I recently upgraded to 1 Gig of RAM. This didn't cause any problems for Windows 2000. Everything booted just fine and things are great. When I try to boot into windows 98SE it gives me an error that windows failed to boot please restart your computer. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

------------------

System Specs:

Asus P2B-D

Dual PIII 700MHz

1 Gig PC100 CAS 2 RAM

Hercules GeForce2 Pro 64MB Video Card

Promise Ultra66 Controller

WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM

WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM

Asus 50x CD-ROM

Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW

SB Live! Platinum 5.1

Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse

Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet

SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

[SHS 0]

Max ram for Win9x is 512

[Donald2B 0]

Well, that is strange then. I am able to boot fine with 768MB but no higher. That sucks.

 

Looks like I will have to revive my 1 GHz T-Bird. I develope art for pc games and I need 98 to run older games that will not run under 2000. I didn't realize adding more ram was going to kill 98. Oh well...Off with it's head! ; )

[Asmo 0]

There IS a way to modify win98 so it will work with more RAM, sorry i dont' remember what it is, but I know it can be done, just wanted to let you know to keep lookin, just have to modify some line in system.ini i think, sorry not much more help than that.

[EddiE314 0]

well, there's a crack to let winme install on 32mb ram boxes, i'm sure it can be modified to allow more ram.

[Four and Twenty 0]

the workaround for ME is to type setup /nm at the dos prompt when setting it up. I have installed Win ME on a computer with 12 megs of ram. But at any rate i don't think that will help here cause it is only to get around the min requirement not the max limit.

[sxbarnes 0]

Asmo is right.

 

There is a upper page limit setting that must be entered in system.ini

 

It will tell windows9x/ME not to go above that page when using ram.

 

AFIR it needs to go into the [386enh] section and must be named MaxPhysPage = 40000 (that is for 1 gig, it is the hex number of "4096 k pages allowed).

 

Some have said to set it lower (maybe half?) and create a 512meg ramdisk then set the virtual memory to use the ramdisk instead of hard drive for casche/swap. Supposedly makes windoze run much faster, but I've never tried it.

[jmmijo 1]

HERE's the complete KB article from Microsoft's website on this particular issue