Computer Hope

Hello,
Installed win98 to have a true MS-DOS in native mode operating system. The best thing about it: Restarting in MS-DOS mode is not working when I click the shutdown menu and restart in MS-DOS. The display looses signal and the computer goes into an unknown state. I thought it may be something to do with the video card, so for the record I am using an ATI7000 AGPX4 Card. The motherboard has INTEL Chipset ICH2.
I tried to smooth out the installation as much as I know how. Installed all of the drivers I found online and on the disks, no problems in the device manager other than the onboard sound. Could not find a driver that works still searching.

The other thing, I did find in the COMMAND FOLDER several MS-DOS shortcuts for games. EMS and XMS support, or just XMS, and also a plain Restart in MS-DOS. So the first two seem to work and reboot while the latter does the same as when I click on restart in MS-DOS from the shutdown menu. I thought that it may have something to do with config.sys file or autoexec.bat, so, I checked the files and printed them out, except the latter file which is set to simply use "existing MS-DOS Configuration" and which does not show the contents, (program tab on the shortcut that is).

Another thing, I thought to check the config.sys and autoexec.bat files on the root of my drive, but they are empty. Only one line device=C:\windows\setver.exe

I tried making a few changes to the config.sys but immediately had a problem at boot, so I think that first line setver.exe is critical to windows starting.

Any suggestions, please help. If anyone knows where I can turn to, please do.

Perhaps your display doesn't support the text mode? Are you able to boot directly into MS-DOS Mode via the F8 at startup? (you have to press it before the boot logo appears)

I don't think so, DOS will work when I hit F8 at boot. So the card must supports text mode?
The only problem I have is with the shutdown menu command to restart in MS-DOS.

Can this be anything with ACPI Power Management. I found out there is a special switch to use when installing as in > setup.exe /PJ

Well, pressing F8 at startup should give a similar capability, as a workaround.

Is this Windows 98 SE, or FE? the original release had a lot of bugs involving restarting in MS-DOS Mode. And both versions often had Conflicts with the video card drivers that prevented it altogether.

Sometimes it also takes quite a while to actually get to the DOS prompt- so maybe give it a few minutes at the blank screen. if you haven't done so.

If you have SE you'll want the  "Unofficial service Pack" as it rolls in a number of updates Microsoft released, including one titled "Shutdown supplement" specifically to fix "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" issues.

I checked the video related bios settings, and there was one option to "reserve IRQ  for VGA Card", and since I have AGP, decided I don't need to take up the extra resource. Enabling this to see if it would make a difference actually did, and I'm now able to restart in DOS from the shutdown menu. I wonder if I will need that IRQ for something else? OR it is funny how computers work.

Does anyone know what this means.
Autoexec.bat
REM The following lines have been created by Windows. Do not modify them.
REM
C:
CD C:\Windows
CALL C:\Windows\command.com
C:\windows\win.com /wx

Couldn't reboot, so I blanked out the whole autoexec.bat file. This was in there, and not sure how it got there, since I think the whole thing was blank to begin with. Couldn't find what the /wx switch means neither. Not sure if I can/need to put them back now?
Any way I can regenerate the files.

That's generated by Windows when you reboot into MS-DOS mode. It places that there so that you can type Exit and "return" to windows.

The /WX switch is undocumented. It will restart the computer and will restore config.sys and autoexec.bat from the "old" versions that windows replaced when the system was restarted in MS-DOS mode; these originals are CONFIG.WOS and AUTOEXEC.WOS.