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:

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).

  1. 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
    
  2. 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.

  3. 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: