Anyway, the most viable solution I found so far was to install a small DR-DOS utility for recognizing Extended FAT32 partitions. While the DOS that ships with Win98SE is supposed to do it, it still has problems with 20+ GB drives.

You mean PATH I presume?

Edited by Breaker at 15:29 on October, 21st 2002

This is probably not your problem, but if it's not done you should do it;

Add in your autoexec.bat file

Edited by Eagle of Fire at 01:18 on October, 21st 2002

Yup, that's worth a try. I'll see whether that works... However, the command prompt works fine on other Win98 machines, so I don't know what's wrong with this one...

What if you create a boot disk for dos 6, and then try and run the game from your harddisk? Probably won't work since you are using FAT32, but worth a try?

Also not possible . Before I installed anything, I re-installed the whole hard drive, so it came as clean as from a factory...

You're right, I missed that. In that case, I'd be inclined to say all that partitioning and de-partitioning of the hard drive has screwed up your system somewhat .

Well, the DOS I'm using is the "Command prompt only". Version 7 was never released as a stand-alone; it's only bundled with Win9x, and Windows reffers to it as the "Command prompt".

I'm not entirely sure, but I think your problem might be with DOS itself (or, at lest, its coexistance with Win98). I'm using Windows 98 as well and I can run Colonization just fine in all three possible ways: straight from the Windows GUI, from a DOS box, and after a "command-line only" boot.

Try getting rid of DOS (or maybe excluding C:DOS from your path statement, might be enough) and see what happens.

Edited by Dizzy at 20:50 on October, 17th 2002

That's what I thought, but the DOS version in question is DOS 7.0, which is supposed to recognize FAT 32. I'm really confused by the fact that the games work in a DOS box in Windows, though...

Not sure if it has anything to do with it, but could it be that the programs were expecting FAT instead of FAT32?

I'm getting a little frustrated with the whole partition thing. Right now, I'm a little too busy to get the computer out of commission for a day or two again, so I decided to stick with Win98SE and simply boot in "Command Prompt only" whenever I started the PC and manually enable mouse, CD-ROM, etc...

When I did it the first time, however, a strange thing happened. The DOS behaves almost as if I ran it on a NTFS partition (it's a FAT32 partition, though). Whenever I try to run programs that try to access another executable files, the computer freezes up. For example, Colonization starts with "colonize.bat", which automatically accesses the intro program and then the main program. Write to disk (such as saving games) doesn't work, either. Both work just fine in a DOS box in Win98.

Any ideas what may be causing it and how to solve the problem?