should woulda coulda...🙂
The way I had disabled Win98 should have been sufficient for installing XP, or even a re-install of Windows. Unfortunately, neither would work. so...I went through and cleaned out the hard drive, ghosted the data I really though needed saving, and then wiped the drive. Booted to a 98 startup disk, choosing to bypass all system files. Ran fdisk and removed the partition. Created a new primary partition. Booted to XP CD. Started loading files, and then when it got to the "Starting Windows" section, I received PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA. (which is the same as before I wiped the drive) decided to format the drive with 98. Formatted disk, tried booting to the Win XP cd, and got the same result. Booted to the Win98 disk w/ CD support. Switched to the CD and ran winnt from the command line ot kick off the install. Still got the same error as it attempts to start windows.
Tried Windows 98. 98 started to run, then suddenly dropped me back to the C:\ prompt. no errors. Try to start setup again, and i just go to a C:\ prompt without anything loading. I have tried installing 98 by booting first, then running setup from the CD AND booting from the CD directly. Neither work.
The 512Mb Crucial stick is brand new, but I guess it could be flaky. Only have 1 stick of DDR, so i can't swap it out to test with a known good. I really don't know what to do with this system. If i just wanted to run DOS on this thing, I think I'd be set!
I found a thread on doomforum or something like that (never been there before, but a search in Google hit upon it -- shoulda bookmarked it!) where some guy was complaining about the "file setupdd.sys could not be loaded" error that he kept getting. It seemed to me that he had a new board, but he also mentioned that it was working fine. He then said that Win 95 & 98 also were crapping out on him. He finally swapped ram chips with his roommate and found that everything ran fine. his Ram was flaky. i have a memory testing program that I guess I'll run on it and see what it finds. This is crucial ram, though, so I'm surprised. I referred my sister to Crucial because I have always heard they are the best, but damn...this is the first time I have EVER gotten a bad stick of RAM from anywhere - shows, retails, etc. Not too impressed with Crucial at this point, if the RAM is definitely the problem.