QuickInstall boot prompt timeout is too short (currently ~5 seconds)

[denilsonsa]

Checklist

• I have searched the issue tracker and was unable to find an open or closed issue matching what I'm seeing.
• (If the issue occurs AFTER or DURING Windows 9x's hardware detection phase) I have tried to install with Skip legacy non-PnP hardware detection phase to [OFF] and the issue still occurs.
• (If the issue occurs AFTER or DURING Windows 9x's hardware detection phase) I have tried to install with the integrated driver library set to [OFF] and the issue still occurs.
• I understand that support is provided voluntarily for free, and that the author is not Microsoft and can/will probably not fix bugs in the operating system code itself. I also understand that it is impossible to support every single hardware combination out there.

What happened?

Currently, there is a boot menu at the ISO image that says: "Press ENTER to start QuickInstall", and with a countdown of 5 seconds or less. Unfortunately, this countdown is too short. Please remove the countdown, or make it longer (30 or 60 seconds).

Why

Many monitors have a delay of a few seconds after changing video modes. So, after the BIOS splash screen, it can take several seconds until we (users) can see the post-BIOS boot prompt from QuickInstall. Unfortunately, that's not enough time for reading the message, and on some displays it might be impossible to see the message.

To make it worse, if no selection is done, it seems to boot the main hard disk. Which was very troublesome, as I'm trying to reinstall the currently-borked Win98 in my current hard disk. So, instead of booting into the QuickInstall, it keeps booting into the HD. Which made me spend a lot of time troubleshooting it. I was even wondering if the CD wasn't bootable in the BIOS for some weird reason. I spent many many many minutes troubleshooting, which would have been saved if the boot menu hadn't such a short timeout.

How to reproduce

1. Have the hard drive with some installed system (e.g. Win98).
2. I don't have CDs anymore, so use a Raspberry PI with usbode-circle to emulate an optical drive over USB.
3. Plug it in the machine, turn it on.
4. If you're lucky, you can briefly see the QuickInstall boot prompt after the BIOS splash screens. I wasn't so lucky.

Now, the rest are the steps I've done to troubleshooting:

• Increase the BIOS delay, to give enough time for USBODE to initialize.
• Change to another monitor that takes less time to display the image. (It still takes 2~3 seconds, though.)
• Change the video cable.
• Trying the boot menu from the BIOS. (Turns out the BIOS for this machine doesn't have a boot menu.)
• Disable booting from the local hard drive. (Which made me confused on why the heck the hard drive was still booting, despite being disabled in the BIOS.)
• Pressing ESC or any other key to stop/pause the boot prompt, to give me time to read.
• Reboot several times until I finally managed to read "Press ENTER".
• I was about to take pictures or record a video, so I would have enough time to read the boot prompt.

Expectations

Remove the countdown. It serves no purpose. Alternatively, increase it to 30 or 60 seconds, which is long enough to be noticeable.

Linux dmesg output

No response

Target Motherboard, CPU and RAM

No response

Target GPU and Sound card(s)

No response

Target Storage Devices

No response

Boot method

ISO image

Reference image

None

Additional context

I would even send a PR changing the timeout, but in a quick search in the source-code in GitHub I couldn't find where it is being set. I would also guess this timeout is set on multiple places, or it applies to multiple boot methods.

Also, I'm tagging this as a Bug because it prevents users from being able to start QuickInstall. If the timeout is so short that users can't interact with it, and as consequence people can't use the software, that feels like a bug.

[oerg866]

The timeout is set here: https://github.com/oerg866/w98qi-tiny-floppy-bootloader/blob/fc21930dcb7f84ff0ecdd1566f5c2082a7f50388/data.inc#L40

Unfortunately I cannot accommodate every user's individual problems, but there are several things you can do:

1. Just hammer the ENTER key to guarantee a boot
2. Press the PAUSE key on the top right of your keyboard to freeze the countdown
3. Use a different boot method (USB key or launch INSTALL.BAT from DOS)
4. Change the timeout above and re-compile the boot image and attach it to the ISO

I'm afraid a single user's setup is not enough reason for me to change a timeout that has worked flawlessly for almost 4 years, I hope you understand :)

[denilsonsa]

Just hammer the ENTER key to guarantee a boot

Only works once we know we have to do so. ;) And that was the problem, I didn't know. (Well, I guess I may have known it, months ago, and then forgot.)

Press the PAUSE key on the top right of your keyboard to freeze the countdown

I thought about that, and I realized the keyboard I was using didn't have the Pause key anymore.

I'm afraid a single user's setup is not enough reason for me to change a timeout that has worked flawlessly for almost 4 years, I hope you understand :)

I do understand. :)
I may disagree, but I do understand and I respect the directions chosen by the developers.

I see that the timeout is stored as the ASCII '4', which means we can bump it at most to '9' without any visual glitch. It'd prefer the default to be '9', but I won't push for it, as I told you I respect your decision.