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Installing Windows 3.1 on a P4

J

JonnyGators

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Perhaps the answer here will be don't. But I am curious about this problem I encountered and figured may as well see if anyone has any explanation or insight to it.

I have a Pentium 4 machine that I use as kind of a functional vintage computer. It's built to resemble my first build, had to rebuy the mobo and processor, but still has the video and sound cards from the original build. It comes in handy if I need something to create disks, or need an XP or 98 environment, since I set it up to be a 98/XP dual boot.

To play around, I put in an IDE module, to run through the process of setting up Windows 3.1. I figure I'll probably not be able to find video and sound drivers for my hardware, so I don't expect to get to the point of a fully functional install, but I should be able to complete the process and get it running with lesser graphics and no sound. I had no problem installing DOS 6.22. I can run the setup off of the first disk no problem. But when it asks for the 2nd disk, the keyboard is no longer working at that point. It seems that the keyboard works to select easy or custom setup, and works up to the point it starts copying the files off of the first disk. I observed as soon as it reaches that point, I can no longer turn num locks off and on, the light stays lit. The computer isn't frozen, it gets to the point where it asks for disk 2, but with the keyboard not working, I can't press enter for it to go on.

I know that Windows 3.1 probably is of the era before PS2 keyboards. But I could have sworn I once ran through the process no problem on an IBM PII desktop I used to have, which would have been using ps2 mouse and keyboard.

Any ideas what the problem could be, or how to resolve it?
 
Whut? Windows 3.1 dates from 1992, long after the PS/2's introduction in 1987. Besides, The PS/2 keyboard protocol is exactly the same as the PC/AT protocol.

Look to the peripherals and their resource allocation. Likely there's a conflict.
 
Are you using a USB or PS/2 keyboard? On later motherboards with USB keyboards and mice, you have to turn on USB keyboard/mouse legacy support/emulation in the BIOS for some older software to work properly.

maxresdefault.jpg


Different BIOS vendors call it different things.

Legacy Keyboard Support
Port 64/60 Emulation
Legacy USB Support

etc.
 
...I didn't see where the OP said he was using a USB keyboard, but he did mention PS/2.

In any case, if he could install MSDOS 6.22, legacy keyboard support had to have been working, regardless.
 
If all is well after DOS 6.22 has been installed, copy the contents of the Windows floppies to a directory on the C: ("WinInst" or similar), and then run Setup from there.

I seem to remember this working for WFWG3.11, as all of the "Please insert disk x" prompts vanish, and it installs in about a minute.

However, if there is some form of hardware issue, you may have a non-functional installation at the end.

M.
Portsmouth, UK
 
I mentioned that because legacy compatibility on modern motherboards can be very strange.

Irregardless if you have a PS/2 or USB keyboard/mouse, they can be affected by legacy emulation options in the BIOS.

DOS can work fine on the command line, but programs won't accept any keyboard/mouse input.

It doesn't make any sense, but I've seen it happen thousands of times across hundreds of different hardware configurations.
 
I am using PS2 mouse and keyboard. I have found no options in the BIOS specifically relating to USB mouse or keyboard. The only options I can find are those to turn off USB. Since I'm not using USB in DOS or Windows 3.1, I turned them off to test if that makes a difference. It didn't. As soon as the Windows 3.1 setup process begins, keyboard functionality disappears. Mind you, the start of the setup process, it works fine. It's not until I make the choice of express or custom that it immediately stops, leaving me with no way to press enter when inserting disk 2. So odd.

What next?
 
You know, I once ran across a motherboard whereas the PS/2 ports were actually an onboard USB adapter. Maybe that's what is happening here? It's rare I've run across this to be honest but maybe you have a board which doesn't truly have a PS/2 keyboard controller and instead runs it off the USB root hub instead? *shrugs*.

I don't even want to know how MY modern AMD machine would handle Windows 3.11 with my keyboard (an XT Model F running through a USB converter). It certainly wouldn't be worth it short of using Dosbox where I can at least have S3 video drivers for high res and color modes.
 
I took the advice and opened up a thread on Vogons. One piece of information that got added to that thread was that, if I selected the option for custom setup instead of express, the keyboard immediately failed when it got to the screen showing me the hardware it detected. Someone there suggested running setup.exe /i, which disables the hardware detection, and that did the trick. Not sure why, but on my motherboard, the hardware detection process disables the keyboard.

Anyways, the install completed, and I can play solitare, woo! I doubt I can find drivers for the sound and video cards in this machine, so this wasn't that useful of an exercise....was just tinkering around on this machine, and the problem made me more curious I guess.

Now onto the next problem....Windows 95 won't install on this machine, even with the patch.
 
How about Win98SE? I've been running that on a P4 for years. Be careful, though--my system has 4GB of memory and it took some playing with HIMEMX.SYS to reduce the amount of available memory so that 98SE could install.
 
Yes, this machine is primarily a 98SE/XP dual boot machine, which comes in handy if I need to do something in one of those environments. I did have to deal with the memory issue, but that issue is well documented with fixes.

The original build I did with this hardware (Asus P4C800E-Deluxe motherboard, 3.0GHz P4 processor) was originally intended to be an XP/98 dual boot. I had picked up a Lexicon Core 2 audio card dirt cheap on ebay, and the reason it was dirt cheap was because Lexicon pulled all support on it, and there would never be a driver beyond Windows 98 on it. I figured, big whoop, as long as I have a 98 environment to use it in, I can record in my audio there, switch back over to XP, and work on the captured audio.

I was wrong.

To start with, I never got the card to work properly. It had mixed reviews, but all of the negative reviews I read about it had to do with configuration difficulties, which resulted in it not working at all. The simple solution was to not use AMD processors. (The more detailed descriptions pointed out it had something to do with a chipset, so there were some configurations/motherboards that would work with AMD processors). Anyways, I was using it on an AMD Athlon emachines computer at first, and had problems with occasional dropouts. Which if I had dug in enough, I should have figured out that was not the same problem other AMD users were describing. But, with the rule of thumb being Intel good, AMD bad when it comes to this sound card, I picked up a dirt cheap IBM Pentium II machine off of ebay, and paid more for shipping than for the machine. I set that up with the emachines with a KVM switch, and ran into the same problems there too. I figured, well, of course, it's an old machine. So that's when I decided to build a serious powerhouse machine to use this sound card properly. Since I was still on the Intel good, AMD bad mindset for this, I went with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor. I seem to recall that 3.2 were the top of the line ones then, I went a step below top of the line. I don't remember why I landed on the ASUS P4C800E-Deluxe motherboard, I think a friend recommended it. And I bought the cheapest PC case money could buy, which came with a cheap power supply. I still have the case - it stayed with me for a few builds, but I emptied it to reuse it for the rebuild when I did that last year. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card (with the versa jack that allowed 4.0 recording) and the All-In-Wonder Pro AGP video card (with it's ability to watch TV right on my computer screen, wow, what a time we live in, and the ability to capture video to record in my VHS tapes) came over from the emachines (I had added them to that machine) - which was set back to factory default, and given to my friend's parents. The first build went easy enough, put the new parts, and old parts I carried over together, following the instruction book for the motherboard. I had my serious doubts it was going to turn on once it was all together, but, lucky me, came on without a hitch on the first try. I was probably still primarily using 2000 Pro for my primary OS at the time, the emachines came with XP Home which I hated, and I had a 2k Pro disk. It took a while for me to accept XP Pro.

But then it was time to try and set it up to be a dual-boot. I forget the details now, but I know I tried many times to set it up. I believe I had no problem getting the 98 and 2k installs to go through, and have it dual boot....but I kept running into problems with the 98. Driver issues, as I recall. No one seemed to have any answer, except to ditch 98, and go on at length why there's no reason to still be using 98 at this point. Eventually, I gave up, and it became a single boot 2k....and eventually a single boot XP Pro. And at some point I found another sound device by Aardvark that had XP drivers. Which also supported higher sampling rates, which came in handy as dvd-audio authoring on a home PC became a thing. But....that's a whole lot of other stories.

So last year I decide to do the rebuild, because I got sick and tired of looking at the Turtle Beach sound card and All In Wonder Pro AGP video card every time I went through stuff, and kept thinking to myself "I am keeping those....I love those cards....damn, I'd love to use those again". The AGP card I lost with the next build after the original P4 build, I was so pissed that I couldn't buy a motherboard with AGP anymore when it came time for a new build. And I never did buy another TV tuner device to replace that. That was a huge loss. The turtle beach card stayed with me until I finally gave in and upgraded to Windows 7. I sent many angry emails to Turtle Beach for their refusal to release a Windows 7 driver for the card, only to be met with excuse after excuse why they wouldn't. Forced obsolescence.....I hate it. This time around I decided....may as well try that 98 dual boot again. It has drivers for it, it should have been possible....lets figure it out, and then I'll have a fun vintage machine that does 98 and XP. Well, sure enough, I kept running into problems. This time around I started out by maxing out the RAM to 4GB, something I didn't spend the money to do the first build, so that presented me with the RAM issue. But once I fixed that, I kept having issues where after installing drivers, things would start failing. And that's when I figured out the legacy mode that needs to be enabled in the BIOS in order for it to not cause problems with 98, to use SATA and one of the P-ATA buses, or only use P-ATA. Since I was installing to SATA drives, and had my optical drives on the secondary bus, I set it to SATA and secondary P-ATA only. And then it came together, finally.

I still have the lexicon core 2 card somewhere....but further playing around with that some years ago helped me determine I always got the drop out issue with it no matter the hardware. I never figured that one out. Best I can figure, it was a faulty unit, since I never saw other complaints of the exact same problem in my research. But by then, it was a moot point - who needs an audio card that only works in 98 and only supports up to 48kHz? Never could bring myself to throw it out, though.

So then I figured, well....you could use the primary IDE on the machine for other things, and just set the BIOS to P-ATA only as a way to switch between environments. And that started me playing around with DOS/3.1/95 on this machine.


Anyways....there's my rambly answer to Win98SE on this machine. It works great for it, once configured properly.
 
Last edited:
Caluser2000 said:
Last time I looked a P4 is not a first generation Pentium. Vogons.org would be a more fitting site for this.
Click to expand...
Bit over an over the top response isn't it? The first P4s were introduced 20 years ago. There are legal adults who were not alive when they were introduced, I think they count as vintage now!
 
cwathen said:
Bit over an over the top response isn't it? The first P4s were introduced 20 years ago. There are legal adults who were not alive when they were introduced, I think they count as vintage now!
Click to expand...

Eh, he's technically correct as far as the Genre topic (but it was the most relevant Genre I could find), and he did point me towards the forum that did provide me with the correct answer, so no complaints here.
 
This experiment has inspired me....now that I know I can successfully install DOS, 3.1, and upgrade it to 95 on this machine, that made me ponder.....how wide of an upgrade path can I achieve on this machine?

I've seen videos of attempting wide upgrade paths on a VM, but I've not seen it done on real hardware. I think I may have a good candidate here for a machine that can get a wide path. I'm seeing things online that suggest 10 on a P4 is possible. And I don't think it should be too much of a challenge to get 1, 2, and 3.0 on here. I think 3 to 98 might be the biggest challenge for this machine, and I've achieved that. From what I saw on the VM video, going to Windows 2k gives the option to convert from FAT to NTFS, and then I'd need to expand the partition, that should be doable. I think I'm going to give this a go on a live stream.....Windows 1 to 10 on real hardware. I'll do some more testing to see that I can at least get from 1 to 3.1 before I go live....but beyond that, I'll go live without testing, and see how far I can go before I get stuck.

I'm pondering what would be more fun in the path, 2k or ME, since I can't do both.

Also, what fun is this if we don't install some apps along the way, and see what continues to work as we go through the path. Feel free to offer any suggestions or recommendations.

I'm rather excited by this idea, so I'm thinking I'm going to try to shoot for Friday night 8pm EST. It'll be on my Computer Bar channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwzGycIpr-kaczZFM-ay7Gw.
 
My usual setup is 98SE (booting to command prompt), XP or 7, Ubuntu Works fine. Installation should be 98, then XP then Ubuntu. Grub will let you select the OS to boot from.
 
I have a PIII 667Mhz system running FreeDOS and Win 3.1. I haven't tried any applications requiring sound, though. PS/2 mouse and keyboard run fine.
 
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