Has anyone managed to install Win98 SE on a Sony laptop PCJK 315S - all I ever get is "fatal exception" on re-boot!!!!

Did the laptop come with Win98 SE when it left the factory and, if so, are you installing from a Vaio Recovery CD?

Hi Thanks for reply - This laptop was originally purchased with XP but I needed Win 2K which was installed on day 1 no problem. Unfortunately I need to run several old Dos programs which will only run as full window in Win 2k This is not the case with Win98 various people looked at this back then and concluded these progs would need to be re-written unfortunately not an option so Win98 seemed the obvious route...
The hard disk was re-formatted and partitioned using Win98 SE CD and 98 copies over fine (I have tried minimum, custom and laptop setup) but always on the setup re-boot for initializing driver database I get a fatal exception error message. Typically 0E @ 0028 (?)

Check these and post any findings/results;

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;138788

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;189655

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;188867

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;190915

Thanks for the links - Although I didn't find any thing directly in the articles I noticed that a lot of the MS error messages there were typically called from somewhere .
From Safe mode I disabled the network adapter (there wasn't much that could be disabled) and consequently this changed the memory allocations on the next boot. This time I got the same fatal exception 0E @ 0028 (xxxx) but called from ACPI 02. I renamed the ACPI.sys file in windows\system and bingo 98 setup completed. I need to load the Sony drivers next and I also see from the Device manager that the computer is reporting 2 ACPI.sys bus types Code 2 ??? so it can't load a driver... I would have thought it would have reported a missing file - anyway.
If I return the ACPI.sys file I still get the original fatal error message (and not called) when I boot so still some more investigating to do.
Thanks all for the help

Nice bit of troubleshooting there JimmyJ

In case you didn't already know, ACPI is all to do with power management. It's likely that there are specific drivers for your chipset and/or motherboard that came with the Sony but, as it was delivered with XP, it's quite possible that there isn't a 98 version. You're saying that there doesn't seem to be a way of loading drivers for the ACPI devices through Device Manager but maybe you have a setup program for the chipset or motherboard that will install them from the Sony CD? From what I recall, Sony recovery CD sets sometimes have a separate drivers folder on the last CD.

Hope that helps.

It's taken a while but I'm getting there on most drivers - I have downloaded the original driver & utility set from Sony site but have had to give up on ACPI driver for now - not sure what the implication of that will be but typically this laptop is used for data logging anyway. They also had a Bios update on their site but I am reluctant to run the exe file as yet - I cannot determine the date of the bios presently installed - Sony won't help because it's a different operating system than supplied - fair enough for drivers I guess - you could get seriously bogged down in a lot of this! but I'm a bit ticked off re: bios - anyway biggest problem seems to be that I cannot get a USB driver that is recognisable /compatible with Win 98 - any ideas anybody?
cheers jimmyj

If Sony don't supply a driver for the USB chip on the motherboard, then that does make things rather difficult. If there's a Windows ME driver available, that will probably work. Alternatively, if you can find out an ID number for the USB chip, you might be able to find it on another manufacturer's web site by searching Google. Failing that, I guess you'd have to resort to buying a PCMCIA USB card.

Download/install/run Everest Home Edition (clean Freeware). Post back what it reports re; the motherboard and chipset(s) info. I've "re-energized" many HP, Comcrap, IBM, etc machines with the info in this program. If you use the Report Wizard and save all pages in HTML format, you'll have a report document that you can open and click on links to the hardware manufacturers for the components in your system.

Thanks,
Sounds useful - I'll give it a go