Windows 98 Second Edition May Hang Due to System.ini Entry

ID: Q233036

The information in this article applies to:

SYMPTOMS

When you attempt to suspend a computer running Windows 98 Second Edition, the computer may stop responding (hang).


CAUSE

The name of the swapfile used by Windows 98 can be changed by adding a PagingFile= line to the 386Enh section of the System.ini file. If the path specified for the swapfile includes a lowercase drive letter, it can cause Windows 98 Second Edition to occasionally hang during a suspend.


RESOLUTION

To resolve this issue, change the lowercase drive letter specified for the swapfile path in the System.ini file to uppercase. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Click Start, click Run, type msconfig, and then click OK.


  2. Click the System.ini tab, double-click 386Enh to expand the branch, click PagingFile=, and then click Edit.


  3. Change the drive letter to uppercase. For example, change the following line from
    PagingFile=d:\win386.swp
    to

    PagingFile=D:\win386.swp.


  4. Click Apply, click OK, and then click Yes to restart your computer.



STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.


MORE INFORMATION

The I/O subsystem driver (IOS) in Windows 98 (Ios.vxd) attempts to determine the paging device so it can mark it as a device that cannot be powered off until interrupts have been disabled. IOS does this by retrieving the path for the swapfile, stripping out the drive letter from this string, and subtracting the ASCII value for an uppercase letter "A," to determine the drive number. It assumes the drive letter is always specified using an uppercase letter, and does not convert lowercase drive letters to uppercase before subtracting to determine the drive number.

If IOS cannot determine the paging device, it will cause the drive to be powered off early in the suspend phase when interrupts are still enabled. After the paging drive is powered off, Windows 98 Second Edition attempts to flush the drive. If at this point there is still cached data that has not been written to disk, the attempt to flush the drive will fail because the disk is powered down and cannot accept I/O requests.

The FAT file system will attempt to display an error message about this failure; however, the display device is already powered off at this point, so it will appear that the machine is hung.

Additional query words: 


Keywords          : win98se kbACPI 
Version           : WINDOWS:
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbprb

Last Reviewed: July 29, 1999