Vista - win98se on xp-pro

I sure hope someone can give me a clue what to try next.

I'm running xp-pro on an AMD machine that's about 3 years old. I had
vpc 2007 installed and a win98se vm that I was using to do database
work. I had a copy of the same vm on a vista business machine.

Anyway a couple of months ago I shut down the 98se and when I tried to
open it a week later it comes up with a black screen and refused to
even close. The vista machine vm is fine. I tried everything I could
think of but could not get it to do any more.

Today I discovered that sp1 is out on vpc 2007 so I downloaded and
installed it on the amd machine, then copied the vhd from the vista
machine and tried it with the update-- same results, black screen will
not boot from a floppy or a cd. I checked and the vhd still works fine
on vista. I was afraid to install sp1 on my vista machine because I use
an xp-pro vm for most of my work and can't afford to have it disturbed.
I tried to boot the vm from BartPE to see if I could see what was going
on but no luck. The cd never lights up. I can boot the whole machine
from the cd with no problem--same with my old 98se full install cd. I
guess I could try to install 98 in a new vm -- but this looks crazy.

Finally I uninstalled vpc2007, reset my machine then installed sp1
fresh. When I started it, it found the same two vm's I had before -- a
win98 vm and an old win95 vm which I installed to test an old game but
never have used since. Same results -- a black screen. But at least I
have the option of closing the vm and don't have to force it closed
with task manager.

I guess I'll try to install 98se from scratch and see if that works.
Any ideas would be certainly welcome.



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Joe H wrote:

More: I can't install anything in the vm on this machine. It will not
see the disks. Even an xp-pro vm will not load but just gives the same
black screen. What can go wrong with hardware that will not let any
virtual machines run but doesn't seem to bother anything else? Since it
happened suddenly it does seem like something must have broken on the
machine but what could it be?

This is really strange. I just bought parallels because it supports usb
but I can't install anything in it on this machine either. The computer
seems to work fine otherwise. Surely my nod32 couldn't be stopping it
from running? I'll try turning it off long enough to test that. -- Did
not help! I am running as administrator.

So the problem has to be what hardware failure could prevent vpc and
parallels from loading a vm or from booting from a cd or floppy but
doesn't seem to have any effect on anything else in the machine? The
machine itself will boot from the 98 floppy and from the 98CD or the
Bartpe cd. I'll run a memory test just in case but I would think that
would cause tons of other problems as well.

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Did you say the original 98se VM that doesn't work on the XP machine does
work on the Vista machine?

My initial thought would be what did you install/uninstall on the XP machine
between the time yo last successfully started the Win98se VM and then could
no longer get it to start. Microsoft patches? Beta versions of anything? New
Hardware? New drivers? New games?

You indicated that you were able to start the VM using a BartPE disk, but
that the hard drive wasn't seen. Take a look at your configuration, detach
the hard drive and reattach it to a different/new VM, does it see it?

"Joe H" <joedotah@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:u2KIeadPJHA.728@xxxxxx

Tim Walsh wrote:
The 98se vm works fine on Vista but not on xp-pro. That said, it did
work about two months ago on xp-pro. I quit on it when it would not
load and did not try the others on xp-pro until today.
No games. But for sure windows updates, service pack 3 that I know of.
I mostly use this machine as a second machine on my desktop to look up
Internet things and as a reference machine while programming. Also
might write a very short test program to check out the way something
works.
Bartpe would not load from the vm. In fact no cd's or 3.5" disks will
start up. I have the Microsoft win98 boot disk and it boots stright
from a cold boot but when I try to do a reset in the vm, the light on
the 3.5" drive comes on for a second or two then shuts off but nothing
happens.
I created a completely new vm then attached that hard drive to it and
it did the same thing. Then I tried even my xp-home vm and it would not
load either and an old win95 vm. I even copied the fully functioning
98se vm from the vista machine and it still did the same thing.

I will try to install the vpc2007 on an xp-home computer I have here
and see if it can install 98se. If it's related to xp-sp3 then all of
my machines would be affected except the vista machine which has a
functioning vpc2007 on it.

The strangest thing is I was trying to install 98se in parallels
because of the failure on vpc2007 and I had exactly the same problem.
It just would not load the floppy or the cd. I even made images of the
cd and floppy using their tools and it still would not see them either.

Thanks for your input. At this point I will try parallels on vista and
see if it will install 98se and also on an xp-home machine to try to
isolate what is failing. I only have xp-pro on this machine and a full
version in a vm on the vista machine. I have several others with
xp-home.

More on topic. I was able to install 98se in parallels on xp-home
machine. Extremely sloooooow install but it worked. Had to use diskette
and cd image, however to get it to start. Feel certain vpc2007 would
work there as well.

Also able to install same in parallels on vista. Much faster because
machine is much faster but still takes a long time. Again could not
load directly from diskette or cd.

Setup same image files of cd and fdd on xp-pro machine and it pops up a
black screen and never does any more. Certainly does not load the
floppy image. So this most likely is not xp sp3 upgrade fault unless
that is very different on xp-pro. I ran memory test with memtest86 and
it found no problems with memory after running for an hour.

So now to summarize the problem: cannot load ANY vm's on my amd64
xp-pro (32-bit os) machine. It has 2-gigs of memory. Vpc2007 and
parallels will not load the floppy disk or even an xp pro cd to create
a vm. Existing vm's will not load but are stuck at a black screen (have
to shut down with task manager). I uninstalled and reinstalled vpc2007
to no avail. I installed vpc2007 sp1 to no avail. No other symptoms
that I know of. I can load my full Delphi 2007 ide with no difficulties
or errors encountered.

The question is: what could cause this behaviour or any other ideas as
to what to look for. Anyone? This machine may have real player that is
not on the other machines but that was installed recently. The problem
with the vm's started at least two months ago and may actually have
been longer since I haven't been using vm's on this machine that much.
Any help or ideas anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:30:13 -0800, "Joe H" <joedotah@xxxxxx> wrote:
Have you updated all your drivers from the manufacturer's website?
Specifically, I'd look at video drivers, NIC, and BIOS updates.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:
Thanks. I went through the mfg web site for this machine and all the
drivers are dated in 2004 or 2005. I have a 512 meg ati radeon video
card and according to their download I have the latest version of that.
network drivers are built into the aesus motherboard and I doubt the
drivers now are different from the 2005 versions on the web site.
Anyway I give up. Can't imagine what's wrong here but the parallels vm
I made on vista loads fine on xphome (an old dell) but will not run on
the xp-pro machine (2 or 3 years newer). I'll just stick to the core 2
duo vista machine to run these.

Is there a way to cause the vm to show what it's doing like a real
machine so you can see what's loading and what fails? I don't think it
ever gets to loading the os itself.

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Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:
I bought Driver Detective, ran it and it found 11 drivers out of date
including video, and many motherboard elements. Updated all and problem
remains exactly as it was. VPC will not load an existing vm or even set
up a new one by reading a floppy disk or the cd when you start the vm.
It makes a black screen and just sits there. So drivers are not the
cause of this problem.


Machine seems to load xp about a 3rd faster however so It wasn't a
total waste of time.

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:12:38 -0800, "Joe H" <joedotah@xxxxxx> wrote:
That is really strange!
Can you post the complete specs of the machine that's not working?

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:

* AMD Athelon 64 Processor 3400 + w/ HyperTransport Technology 2.41 Ghz
single core, 64-bit processor
* 2-gigs of memory
* xp-pro sp3
* K8NHA MB socket 754 CPU
* HIS ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 512MB AGP video
* using nod32 antivirus for at least three years.
If there is something that's part of "complete specs" I'm not sure what
it would be. I'm using several sata hard drives and a removable ide
drive but that hardware has not changed in several years.

Realize the vm's worked on this for at least 6 months earlier this
year. I had a power spike one day where the power went off and back on
about six times in a 10-second span and even though I had everything on
a ups, it still messed up the (almost new at the time) acer monitor I
had (it wouldn't show the 1440x900 resolution it wanted). I bought a
new video card thinking that would solve the problem but it did not.
Apparently unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in restored the
missing resolution. I'm not sure but I think that may have coincided
with when I last was able to run a vm on that machine. Nothing else
shows any problems. I still can't figure what could cause vm's to fail
for two different programs in exactly the same way but not affect
anything else. I've loaded the win98 boot disk from a cold boot with no
problems. Same with the 98se install cd.

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