MS-DOS hangs at "HIMEM is testing extended memory"

[Yossu]

I just created a new VM and ran an MS-DOS installer I got from here.

I have created a VM from this before without problem (well, apart from the grief I had getting the CD to work, endless thanks to some kind people here who helped me fix that). However, I just tried again, and when setup completes, it reboots the VM but then hangs at the point mentioned in the title.

The previous VM I created used to pause for a few moments at that stage, but then boot into DOS. I've deleted and recreated the VM a few times, but I get this problem every time now.

Anyone any idea what's going wrong and how I fix it.

Thanks

[Yossu]

OK, my bad. I'd previously set 8Mb of RAM (ha ha ha!), which took HIMEM a few moments to check. These last few times I upped it to 256Mb (still rather ha ha ha), so it was taking 32 times as long, ie quite a lot of moments. Seems it wasn't hanging before, it was just checking a lot more memory than before.

Is there anyway I could close a question like this? I can't see it being useful to anyone in the future, and it seems a shame to clog the site up with my mistake.

[RDPetruska · Accepted solution]

Yes, I've had this issue for several major versions of Workstation now.  I finally got it to bypass by adding a switch in the config.sys file to the HIMEM load line.

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /testmem:off

[Yossu]

Thanks for that, good to know!