Franc Zabkar wrote:

Is this it?

Negative Hard Disk Free Size Reported on Virtual Memory Tab in
System Properties: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272620

As reported he

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272620

I obtained the updated file from the win-98 service-pack thing
(unpacked it manually) and replaced my existing sysdm.cpl. While it
did correct the display of a negative free size on the hard drive, it
did not solve the virtual memory issue.

I then connected another SATA drive to the system (160 gb, with a
single 25 gb FAT-32 partition, formatted with 4 kb clusters, a little
over 6 million clusters) and Win-98 DID enable virtual memory when
instructed to put the swap file on the new drive.

So for some reason win-98 did not want to locate the swap file on the
500 gb drive. Either it did not like the fact that the drive was
formatted with 4kb cluster size (resulting in 121 million clusters) or
it didn't like where on the drive it would have to put it (at the back
10% of the drive).

Also -

I increased the amount of installed memory to 1 gb, and still got
"insufficient memory" when running Windows Scandisk and Defrag on the
500 gb drive.

DOS scandisk does not give an error, but it would have taken 4 days to
run (given it was at the 30% point after 30 hours).