[Dave-H]

Well, finally my problem is cured!!


The answer has finally come from Rudolph Loew, the creator of the Windows 98/SE/ME RAM Limitation Patch.

I had been using version 5.1 of his patch for some time, to allow my system to function with 4GB of RAM installed.
With it Windows 98 sees 3327MB, pretty near the same as Windows 2000, and the limit for a 32 bit OS.

Rudolph has just released the next version, 6.0, which includes some interesting options for optimising the use of low physical memory.

I quote from his manual -

"Some Devices, especially many Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, require space in
Low Physical RAM. Low Physical RAM is also used by Windows 98 or 98SE for
Memory Tables. If there is not enough Free Low Physical Memory, Windows will
crash during Bootup. Reboot, a Blank Screen, or a VFAT Error are the most
common symptoms."

Well, that describes my problem completely!
It even explains why disabling my network card allowed the system to boot, something I never understood.
Why it's taken so long to discover this is a mystery to me, as I did an enormous amount of research on possible causes of the problem.

Anyway, using Rudolph's new patch, with the necessary switch which moves the VXD data above 16MB, and adding his additional low memory splitter program to autoexec.bat, the problem has completely gone away!

I restored all the data to my registry which I had stripped out and backed up as being superfluous to get the size of the system.dat file down, and the system still booted, with a file of over 14MB!
That would have been impossible before.

So thanks indeed Rudolph!
I hope you are subscribed to this thread and read this.

Anyone else suffering similar problems, you now know where to find a fix -
http://rloew1.no-ip.com

It's not free, but IMO it's worth $20 of anybody's money, as it does exactly what it says on the tin, and more!
After all this time I am well pleased.

[rloew]

My Registry never got so big that it caused a problem.

Like the Ethernet Driver, the Registry is also placed in Low RAM limiting available DMA space.

It would explain why I noticed that the maximum RAM I could use decreased after every update I did to my machine. With everything loaded I could not run even with 1GB of RAM.

I didn't think the SPLIT8MB.EXE Program was needed after I added the "Move VXD" Option to my RAM Limitation Patch but with a 14MB Registry you probably need it as well.

[xrayer]

Dave-H, on Feb 24 2009, 06:58 PM, said:

Rudolph has just released the next version, 6.0, which includes some interesting options for optimising the use of low physical memory.
Well, that describes my problem completely!
It even explains why disabling my network card allowed the system to boot, something I never understood.
Why it's taken so long to discover this is a mystery to me, as I did an enormous amount of research on possible causes of the problem.

Hi,
I had the same problem with onboard RTL8111A gbit ethernet. I was trying it wit R.L.'s patch 4.0 but it caused BSOD. I revealed that when I disable
eth. in control panel and reenable it after boot I can use 2GB RAM with the patch. Now with new version it works fine with network enabled.
But currently I use win98 only sometimes and all memory consuming jobs like photo editing I do under XP and 1,1GB is enough for my w98 setup
so I will not go to pay for the patch...

[Dave-H]

rloew, on Feb 26 2009, 12:23 AM, said:

My Registry never got so big that it caused a problem.

Like the Ethernet Driver, the Registry is also placed in Low RAM limiting available DMA space.

It would explain why I noticed that the maximum RAM I could use decreased after every update I did to my machine. With everything loaded I could not run even with 1GB of RAM.

I didn't think the SPLIT8MB.EXE Program was needed after I added the "Move VXD" Option to my RAM Limitation Patch but with a 14MB Registry you probably need it as well.

Thanks Rudolph.
Glad you are across this thread!


I have tried removing the line to load SPLIT8MB.EXE from my autoexec.bat, and the system still boots fine.
Do you think I should leave it disabled or keep it loading anyway just to be on the safe side?
I assume that there is no disadvantage in loading it.

As I said, my registry system.dat file is now 14MB, and that's after removing a lot of registry space hogging programs (Real Player is one of the worst!) to get its size down.
I had got it down to just over 12MB, which seemed safe, but with your patch it seems like I now don't have to worry any more!


The problem originally came to light when I installed Office XP on the machine.
That also writes huge amounts of registry data.
Whether I could now get away with reinstalling it I don't know.
With your patch probably yes, but I hate to think how big system.dat would then become!
As I use it on Windows 2000 quite happily, I think I'll leave it like that.
I don't really need to have it on Windows 98 as well.

I'm just happy that at last I'm free of having to obsessively prune and compact my Windows 98 registry all the time to make sure it doesn't get too big again and stop the system booting!
I'm very grateful for that.

[Drugwash]

Dunno what kind of machines you guys have, but my Soyo Pentium III reads SYSTEM.DAT: 16,470,048 bytes and USER.DAT: 2,621,472 bytes and have no such problems.
Granted, it only has 256MB RAM and no Gigabit Ethernet adapter (just a regular 10/100MB one).

[rloew]

Quote

I have tried removing the line to load SPLIT8MB.EXE from my autoexec.bat, and the system still boots fine.
Do you think I should leave it disabled or keep it loading anyway just to be on the safe side?
I assume that there is no disadvantage in loading it.

I wrote SPLIT8MB first, then reworked my Patch. Either works alone on my Computer. I included SPLIT8MB in case the Patch wasn't sufficient.
If it is not needed, you can disable SPLIT8MB as it will use up a small amount of RAM.

[rloew]

Drugwash, on Feb 26 2009, 11:15 AM, said:

Dunno what kind of machines you guys have, but my Soyo Pentium III reads SYSTEM.DAT: 16,470,048 bytes and USER.DAT: 2,621,472 bytes and have no such problems.
Granted, it only has 256MB RAM and no Gigabit Ethernet adapter (just a regular 10/100MB one).

I think only part of the Registry is actually loaded during Boot, so the amount of RAM and the use of Gigabit Ethernet seem to be be much more important.

[Dave-H]

rloew, on Feb 26 2009, 03:41 PM, said:

I wrote SPLIT8MB first, then reworked my Patch. Either works alone on my Computer. I included SPLIT8MB in case the Patch wasn't sufficient.
If it is not needed, you can disable SPLIT8MB as it will use up a small amount of RAM.

Thanks Rudolph.
I'll probably leave the SPLIT8MB file on the system and just REM out the line in autoexec.bat rather than remove it.
Then I can easily re-enable it if any problems do appear.
You do say that new programs can sometimes over-write your patched files and cause problems to come back, and that will be "belt and braces" should that ever happen!
Cheers, Dave.

[rloew]

Dave-H, on Feb 26 2009, 11:53 AM, said:

rloew, on Feb 26 2009, 03:41 PM, said:

I wrote SPLIT8MB first, then reworked my Patch. Either works alone on my Computer. I included SPLIT8MB in case the Patch wasn't sufficient.
If it is not needed, you can disable SPLIT8MB as it will use up a small amount of RAM.

Thanks Rudolph.
I'll probably leave the SPLIT8MB file on the system and just REM out the line in autoexec.bat rather than remove it.
Then I can easily re-enable it if any problems do appear.
You do say that new programs can sometimes over-write your patched files and cause problems to come back, and that will be "belt and braces" should that ever happen!
Cheers, Dave.

Fortunately, unlike my High Capacity Disk Patch, if the Patch is overwritten, your Computer will not boot but no damage will occur. You can reinstall the Patch from
DOS.

In an earlier post, you mentioned getting a blank screen when your Registry was within a certain range.
I observed similar behavior. There is a narrow range where VFAT initializes properly but the boot does not complete.
On occasion I have seen crashes on the VXDs that follow such as VPICD. This has been reported by others in other forums.
I suspect that VFAT crashes are the most common symptom because it probably is the first to reserve DMA buffers.

[dencorso]

@RLoew: I understand the new capability added to v. 6.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch enables VMM to load at physical addresses above 16 MiB, with the result that the whole VxD arena will start at higher physical addresses, thus freeing the necessary low memory. I also understand that SPLIT8MB has a different, complementary approach to this. Can you explain a little more what does SPLIP8MB do? I did not yet update from v. 5.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch, but I guess I should, since my system.dat is already at 10 MiB and growing...

@RLoew and Dave-H: BTW, I believe I must update all your entries at my List to reflect your upgrade to v. 6.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch, am I correct? I'm striving to keep the List as up-to-date as possible.

[xrayer]

Huh,
I wonder how big registers you have guys. Mine are:
USER.DAT 1765408 25.02.09 23.10 read-only hidden
SYSTEM.DAT 5644320 25.02.09 23.10 read-only hidden
and I have installed hundreds of programs but not the latest MS Office (keeping office 97 + open office)

[rloew]

dencorso, on Feb 26 2009, 06:10 PM, said:

@RLoew: I understand the new capability added to v. 6.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch enables VMM to load at physical addresses above 16 MiB, with the result that the whole VxD arena will start at higher physical addresses, thus freeing the necessary low memory. I also understand that SPLIT8MB has a different, complementary approach to this. Can you explain a little more what does SPLIP8MB do? I did not yet update from v. 5.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch, but I guess I should, since my system.dat is already at 10 MiB and growing...

@RLoew and Dave-H: BTW, I believe I must update all your entries at my List to reflect your upgrade to v. 6.0 of the RAM Limitation Patch, am I correct? I'm striving to keep the List as up-to-date as possible.

SPLIT8MB fragments available Low RAM so that Windows will not put large blocks of data in Low RAM during Real Mode Boot.
The /M option on the Windows 98/SE/ME RAM Limitation Patch was intended to replace SPLIT8MB but it appears that some people need SPLIT8MB.

Version 6.0 of my RAM Limitation Patch makes the same Patches as Version 5.1 for Windows 98SE when not using the /M option.
My other machines have not been updated except for my older GigaByte K8NNXP (RLoew #2) which needed the /M option when I reenabled the RTL8110 Ethernet.

This post has been edited by rloew: 27 February 2009 - 03:49 AM

[Dave-H]

I see my system details have been updated in the list, thanks dencorso.

The one thing that still gets me about all this is that MS have always maintained that there is no size limit on the registry in Windows 98 (as I believe there was in Windows 95.)
From my experience, and others, in certain circumstances this is just not true, because of the 16MB memory limitation on start-up, which unbelievably still seems to apply on Windows 2000 as well!
If you have the time, read through the later posts on my "Faster Startup For Windows 2000" thread, the other thing I've been trying to resolve, and still haven't!
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...18009&st=80
If you can write a patch to fix that for me Rudolph, I really will be impressed!

[jds]

dencorso, on 24 November 2007 - 09:42 PM, said:

But you can also export the whole registry to, say, RegFile.reg, then go to pure DOS (not a DOS box) and run:
smartdrv
regedit /c <path>\RegFile.reg

You'll get essentially the same results.

NB: The above applies to the registry *compactors*.

My 'system.dat' is about 12M, and I just tried the above. Unfortunately, the "regedit" step stopped at 74% complete (no progress for 30 minutes) and I was forced to reboot. In DOS mode, I observed that 'system.dat' was now about 9M. I then did a plain vanilla 'scanreg', which reported the registry corrupted and restored a backup copy. So it looks like the above procedure cannot handle a "large" registry either.

BTW, while I was able to find the Japanese 'regcon' package (version 3.11, file 'rgcon311.lzh') via the Internet Archive, the links to the English translations here are defunct, so I was unable to try this.

Joe.

[dencorso]

Hi, Joe!
I guess you've not been following the forum as you should...
Rick just reposted some of those apps, including RegCon, a few days ago...

herbalist, on 21 May 2011 - 04:45 PM, said:

Quote

Am interested in experience and recommendations concerning "registry cleanup software for Windows ME." was not thinking about registry problems due to malware but just all the junk that Windows adds with time.

Much of what Windows collects is usage tracks. One of the best tools for those on 9X is MRU blaster.

As for destroying your system, you can avoid this by using TestRun by BB to make a test registry to work on. You can also boot to DOS and back up system.dat and user.dat to another location first. If you trash your registry, just restore them from DOS.

I'm not sure of the availability of either so I've uploaded copies of both.

In the thread I linked to earlier, the RegCon utility is good for compacting the registry. I've uploaded it here.
The translated registry docs mentioned are uploaded here.
Both are 7zip archives.

When you get the registry cleaned out, compacted, and optimized, the link in my signature describes using batch files that will keep it that way.

[jds]

dencorso, on 30 May 2011 - 10:26 PM, said:

Hi, Joe!
I guess you've not been following the forum as you should...
Rick just reposted some of those apps, including RegCon, a few days ago...

Thanks, Den.

Unfortunately, time has been rather scarce lately. However, I did check that this thread hadn't been updated before posting. I'll be downloading those files shortly.

Also, the caution about the "regedit /c" technique still stands. I tried a refinement of this as follows :
1. Export the hives of the registry as separate files.
2. In DOS, start a new registry with "regedit /c hkcr.reg"
3. Add the other hives in turn, ie. "regedit hkcu.reg", "regedit hklm.reg", etc.
However, at "regedit hklm.reg", this error was produced : "Cannot import hklm.reg: Error accessing the registry."

Joe.

PS. I've now tried the English-patched 'RegCon' utility and unfortunately, this crashes with the error "SYSTEM.DAT: make sfx failure(32809)". I also tried the associated 'regstrip' utility, and this loads 'user.dat' OK but fails on 'system.dat' (gets part way through, so it looks like a size issue). So, no joy with these utilities by 'haltz'.

I also downloaded but can't use the "TestRun by BB" utility, since that is hardcoded for Windows installations on drive C: (whereas mine is on drive E:).

BTW 'scanreg' and Norton WinDoctor (1998 vintage) both say my registry is OK.

This post has been edited by jds: 31 May 2011 - 02:03 AM

[rloew]

Dave-H, on 27 February 2009 - 01:12 PM, said:

The one thing that still gets me about all this is that MS have always maintained that there is no size limit on the registry in Windows 98 (as I believe there was in Windows 95.)
From my experience, and others, in certain circumstances this is just not true, because of the 16MB memory limitation on start-up, which unbelievably still seems to apply on Windows 2000 as well!

There is no 16MB limitation on the Registry size. I just tested an 18MB Registry. The 16MB limit occurs when the Registry and/or Gigabit Ethernet Drivers take up too much of the lowest 16MB of Physical RAM. I added the /M Patch to my RAM Limitation Patch to insure that this did not happen regardless of Registry Size or type of Ethernet.

[jds]

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 12:16 AM, said:

There is no 16MB limitation on the Registry size. I just tested an 18MB Registry. The 16MB limit occurs when the Registry and/or Gigabit Ethernet Drivers take up too much of the lowest 16MB of Physical RAM. I added the /M Patch to my RAM Limitation Patch to insure that this did not happen regardless of Registry Size or type of Ethernet.

Do the MS 'scanreg' and 'regedit' DOS tools work properly for you with such large registries?

I've found (per above) that 'regedit' does not. As for 'scanreg', it seems happy to backup, restore and "vanilla test" large registries, although I haven't been brave enough to try "scanreg /fix" since my registry has grown beyond the 8M mark that is mentioned earlier in this thread.

Joe.

[Dave-H]

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 12:16 AM, said:

Dave-H, on 27 February 2009 - 01:12 PM, said:

The one thing that still gets me about all this is that MS have always maintained that there is no size limit on the registry in Windows 98 (as I believe there was in Windows 95.)
From my experience, and others, in certain circumstances this is just not true, because of the 16MB memory limitation on start-up, which unbelievably still seems to apply on Windows 2000 as well!

There is no 16MB limitation on the Registry size. I just tested an 18MB Registry. The 16MB limit occurs when the Registry and/or Gigabit Ethernet Drivers take up too much of the lowest 16MB of Physical RAM. I added the /M Patch to my RAM Limitation Patch to insure that this did not happen regardless of Registry Size or type of Ethernet.

I wasn't expecting a reply to this after two years, but thanks Rudolph!

[dencorso]

@RLoew: You talked about a 18MiB registry and the lowest 16 MiB... may I ask, just out of curiosity, at which physical address, even if variable, does Win 9x/ME start loading the registry? Just above the HMA?

@jds: IIRR, the demo version of the RAM Limitation Patch works for 10 min before rebooting... it might be enough, with the /M option, for RegCon to compact your registry (but do create a backup first, and store it safely, of course). BTW, how much RAM does your machine have?