Is this problem too tough for anandtech?

[Scee]

The long and short of it is I have no processor support (as listed in device manager)?

And no one here who has been able to crack it?

Originally I was trying to reinstall win98se because my system had become increasingly unstable. However, I only have 98 at the moment, because trying to reinstall win98se from within windows caused freeze-ups every time I tried and when I tried doing it from abot disk I got the message ?this program requires windows?

After poking around for a while trying to figure out what might me causing this I noticed there is an ! nest to ?processor support? in the device manager. Windows doesn?t have a driver for it, and when I get it to look for one, it doesn?t come up with anything. I?ve tried reinstalling the 4-in-1?s but that doesn?t touch it either. In fact after I finished doing that windows said it was finding drivers for lots of via-ish things like the ?viatech pci to isa bridge.? Wasn?t that what I installed the 4-in1?s for, I don?t want windows doing it!

Anyway, if you think reinstalling win98se will take care of it can you tell me how to do it from a boot disk, avoiding that message?

Or if there?s someway to tell windows where the driver is, how do I do that?

I?d rather not reformat because I?m in the middle of school right now and there were some issues getting my non-standard cd drives to be recognized, in addition to having to reinstall all my software again. (I have three partitions, but most of the stuff is in there with windows)

Thank so much!

Chris

 

[Woodie]

Boot off the bootdisk, then run the correct .exe on the CD to do your setup from DOS.

I think it's: \ $%^&. I left my Win98SE CD at home, so I can't look it up.
Look in the \Win98 directory for *.exe. Try whatever's there: setup, setup32, windows. One of them is for doing an upgrade from within Windows, and another is for doing an install from (real) DOS.

--Woodie

 

[wjsulliv]

Remember to reinstall or upgrade via drivers, first you have to remove the old ones, using the same install program.

I.e. to remove 4.21, run the 4.21 install program, but select uninstall. Reboot, and then reinstall.

 

[Bglad]

First of all, whats the point of having three partitions if you throw most of your stuff in with windows? The point of partitioning is just this sort of situation.

Win98se had several memory and processor support upgrades over the original 98. There were many leaps in memory and processor speeds right around that time. This may be your problem.

Problem is, what you really want to do is wipe your c partition and do a fresh install. My first suggestion is getting something like Norton Ghost, backup that partition, format it clean and do a fresh install of 98se. You can Ghost it to another partition or to a cdrw.

If you don't want to wipe the partition (you really should), try going into your c drive in dos. Rename your windows folder c:\windowsold or something like that. When you reboot it will not be recognized. Drop in the 98se disk and load. This should put on a fresh install without wiping the partition into a new c:\windows folder leaving the windowsold you created for you to retreive your drivers. You will still have to reinstall drivers and software though. There is likely going to be no way around this.

 

[SemperFi]

If the 98se disk you have is the $20 se upgrade bought directly from Microsoft you can't use it from dos. You have to install the first edition then use the se upgrade from windows.

 

[Bglad]

Not true. It will ask for proof of a previous version. You stick in your 98 cd and it will proceed. I think you can use a 98 boot disk as proof also but I'm not sure about that.

 

[gregor7777]

After poking around for a while trying to figure out what might me causing this I noticed there is an ! nest to ?processor support? in the device manager. Windows doesn?t have a driver for it, and when I get it to look for one, it doesn?t come up with anything. I?ve tried reinstalling the 4-in-1?s but that doesn?t touch it either. In fact after I finished doing that windows said it was finding drivers for lots of via-ish things like the ?viatech pci to isa bridge.? Wasn?t that what I installed the 4-in1?s for, I don?t want windows doing it!


I think you may be confused about something here. Correct me if I'm reading you wrong. When you install the 4-in-1's it put the drivers in your win/sys directory, then asks you to reboot. As of right now, the drivers are NOT fully installed. Then upon reboot, it goes through the necessary steps to finalize the install. This is when it comes up with the "installing the viatech pci to isa bridge" window. This is the correct way to do this and you should let it install the driver that it finds.

This may fix windows not being able to find a few things in your hardware config.

Please excuse me if I read your post too fast and read you wrong.

 

[SemperFi]

Bglad, The one I am talking about is not the retail upgrade. I think the only way to get it was from Microsoft directly. It isn't the full version. It was basically a service pack disk.

I remember the first time I tried to reinstall 98 I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn't install.

 

[edblor]

I think Gregor read correctly...at least that was what I got from his post

Let Windows find the new VIA items and then reboot! I'm sure you will find it fixes more than it breaks:Q

Edblor

 

[XeonTux]

If the VIA driver install as listed above does not fix, then

Instead of reinstalling over an existing installation and probably screwing it up more in other ways, I would remove EVERYTHING from device manager in safe mode. Then reboot and let win98 reinstall them all. It will take several reboots, lots of time, some browsing of directories looking for files to satisfy the win98 installer, and probably running some of your device installer programs again. If you were smart when you installed win98 originally you would have put your cabs in \windows\options\cabs and all your device drivers in another directory (I use \support) so you will need no disks.

Everything, you ask? You might not need to get rid of everything, but it certainly sounds like there are some system devices screwed up. Prolly best to get rid of them all and have them reinstalled. And you can't keep any other devices when you get rid of all your system devices. So that is EVERYTHING. If you come across multiple IDE controller drivers that it won't let you remove you get to have fun registry hacking, and maybe reinstalling win98 after all.

The only thing about doing this that really sucks ass, and I'm still not sure why it does it, is that sometimes when the installer is looking for files and asks you where they are it doesn't give you a browse button. WTF. Anyone know why? So then you get to write down the filename, hit cancel, find the file, remove the device, reboot, and do it again.

I have rarely had to resort to reinstalling win98. Usually if I did have to, it was because the end user tried reinstalling it over itself...and sometimes numerous times before they called me. ("Maam? You have 13 primary IDE controller drivers listed here?" I sh!t you not, I couldn't believe it either). Or of course corrupted data, virii outbreaks, crap like that.


IF you do decide to reinstall, format c: /u. mkdir c:\windows\options\cabs. copy d:\win98 c:\windows\options\cabs. cd \windows\options\cabs. remove the cd and run setup.exe from there.