Windows 98 Setup May Hang on Toshiba Tecra or Protege

If you perform a "clean" installation of Windows 98 on your Windows 95-based Toshiba Tecra or Protege laptop computer, your computer may stop responding (hang) with a black screen the second time Windows 98 Setup restarts your computer. After this occurs, you can start your computer only in Safe mode.

This behavior can occur whether you install Windows 98 from the Toshiba Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Windows 98 CD-ROM or a retail Microsoft Windows 98 Upgrade CD-ROM.

A "clean" installation of Windows 98 means either installing Windows 98 on a blank hard disk, or installing Windows 98 in a folder other than the folder in which Windows 95 is installed.

This behavior occurs because direct memory access (DMA) is enabled by default for Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) drives in the upgrade version of Windows 98. Toshiba Tecra and Protege computers are not compatible with the Windows 98 DMA drivers. These computers use Toshiba's own bus-mastering DMA drivers.

For information about resolving this issue, please contact Toshiba.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Windows 98.