Trouble Shooting Guide -
Windows installation problems
Make sure that Windows is loaded
Windows must first be loaded from the Windows installation CD
before trying to install Windows for individual user use.
To verify that the Windows CD has been successfully loaded,
run the command "/bin/dos".
If this works properly and starts a DOS session, then Windows
is fully "loaded". (Type "quit" and the DOS prompt to exit
the DOS session.)
If "/bin/dos" did not properly start up a DOS session then
then this is NOT the troubleshooting page for the problem.
Refer to the page on Problems
loading Windows CD.
The install of Windows failed.
Supported Windows versions
Not all versions of Windows is supported.
Refer to the release notes for additional, perhaps newer detail,
but only American and Western Eurpoean versions of Windows 95
is supported and only the American versions of Windows 98 is supported.
Both Classic and OSR2 versions of Win95 are supported and
both the orginal and "Second edition" versions of Win98 are supported.
Some types of Win98 "upgrade" CDs might not be supported.
Location of "C" drive
By default your DOS and Windows sessions have a "C" drive that
is located at the diretory $HOME/win on the Linux filesystem.
The location of the C drive directory MUST be on the local filesystem
for Windows to work.
If your $HOME is NFS mounted you must change where the C drive is located.
You can change where the C drive is located using the Win4Lin Setup
GUI (i.e. the "winsetup" command), or you can use Linux symbolic links.
Enough disk space?
Make sure that you are not running out of disk space.
Note that in addition to the actual Windows files that take up
disk space (refer to Chapter 2 of the
User's Guide for info about disk space requirements),
while running Windows, some temporary swap files also require
some disk space.
So to run Windows you should have at least 50 to 100 MB of disk
available before starting the Windows session.
256 colors (4 bits) is not really enough.
Some versions of Windows really need at least 64K colors (16 bits)
to work ok.
Windows is installed but won't come up
If you have Windows apparently installed, but it is not coming up correctly,
you can try running "win" by hand from command.com to further verify
the correct configuration.
To do this, start a session with:
/bin/dos +w
This will give you a "C>" prompt in a Win4Lin window.
Type the command:
win
If it says "Bad command or file name", then it could not find "win".
Normally the DOS PATH should be "J:\DOS;J:\MERGE;C:\WINDOWS".
(The c:\windows part is set in c:\autoexec.bat)
Type the command "set"
and one of the things printed out is the PATH setting.
After Windows is installed, the PATH should have
C:\WINDOWS in it, and C:\WINDOWS\WIN.COM should exist.
(i.e. $HOME/win/windows/win.com)
If that first test was OK, then perhaps there is a problem copying
files from the Windows CD when it was first "loaded".
Win4Lin copies the files from the CD by first mounting it
under Linux and doing normal "cp".
We have seen problems with damaged or dirty CDs in the past where
Linux would silently not show some files.
We added code to try to detect this situation, but
flaky Linux CD drivers could be causing silent failures
when reading dirty or damages CDs.
So you can retry loading the Windows CD.
In order to do this you must first unload the Windows CD files
using the "/usr/bin/unloadwindowsCD" script.
The "loadwindowsCD" proceedure copies the windows installation files
into /var/win4lin/dosroot/wincabs.
You can check there to see if all the Windows installation
files got copied there.
When you load the Windows CD, log files are automatically
created in the directory /var/win4lin/log (such as loadwindowsCD.log)
This directory also has some log files created when you install the
Win4Lin RPM.
When reporting to TreLOS about problems loading or installing Windows,
please include copies of the log files from /var/win4lin/log.
Windows comes up but is hung
If when you start a windows session it appears hung:
- 1: Does the CAPS LOCK light toggle when you press the CAPS LOCK key?
- If yes, then it is likely just the Windows session that
is hung. Try switching screens using CTL-ALT-F1
- 2: What was on the screen at the time of the hang?
- This is useful diagnosis information and may help
us know what the system was doing.
- 3: Can you ping or telnet into the system from another system?
- If so, then it may just be that the X-server has hung.
If you telnet in, try killing the X-server.
Windows 95 Y2K Update caused sessions to not start.
The Windows 95 Y2K Update, w95y2k.exe, can be applied
to Win4Lin Windows 95 installations.
But the command.com is only updated in the user's C drive
directory, and Win4Lin also needs to have the shared copy
of command.com updated too.
When the shared copy of command.com is not updated to match
the version on the user's C drive then your Windows sessions will not start.
NOTE: This Y2K update program is for Windows 95 ONLY!
Not for Windows 98.
This is easy to fix, but requires you to be able to log in as root.
The first step is as a normal user, use the w95y2k.exe
program to update your Windows installation.
Find out where your C: drive is located on the Linux filesystem.
Normally this is $HOME/win. For an example this
would be "/home/alex/win"
Then log in as root, so you can update the shared files.
The following assumes you are using the
Bourne shell (/bin/sh).
- Set a variable CDRIVE to be the full path directory name of
the C drive of the user who updated their Windows 95 with w95y2k.exe.
For the example type this command:
CDRIVE=/home/alex/win
- Verify that you have set CDRIVE correctly by doing the following:
ls -l $CDRIVE/command.com
This should show you the file details about the new command.com.
- Now run the following commands to update three shared files
in the directory /var/win4lin/dosroot/dos
from the new versions that w95y2k.exe installed.
cd /var/win4lin/dosroot/dos
mkdir pre_y2k
mv command.com xcopy32.exe xcopy.exe pre_y2k
cp $CDRIVE/command.com .
cp $CDRIVE/windows/command/xcopy32.exe .
cp $CDRIVE/windows/command/xcopy.exe .
If you have more than one installation of Win95, then the
updating the shared files only needs to be done once.
But for each installation you still have to run the w95y2k.exe
update program.
The files that w95y2k.exe updates are:
- windows/winfile.exe
- windows/dialer.exe
- windows/y2kw95.txt
- windows/system/comctl32.dll
- windows/system/mfc40.dll
- windows/system/msvcrt40.dll
- windows/system/shell32.dll
- windows/system/timedate.cpl
- windows/system/vdhcp.386
- command.com
- windows/command.com
- windows/command/xcopy.exe
- windows/command/xcopy32.exe