98 Guy

My Asrock motherboard has both AGP and PCIe slots, but I've never gotten any Nvidia PCIe boards to work on it. My device manager is showing a "pci to pcie bridge" that seems to be ok, so what other issue could be preventing a pcie board from working? What combination of motherboard and pcie video card is known to work properly under win-98?

I used Western Digital software to create a single FAT-32 partition on a WD5000KS SATA drive - using 4kb cluster size (about 121 million clusters). This is on my Asrock motherboard. Read here for details: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=92792 Anyways, just to let you know, the Windows-ME versions of defrag, scandskw and dskmaint.dll do not work given the rather large number of clusters. DOS scandisk does work though. By the way, has anyone here ever heard speculation of a win-98 limitation as to the number of files or directories it can have?

Doesn't anyone here (besides me) read and post to any of the win-98 usenet groups? I hate web-forums like this. I say this because I posted the following a few days ago in microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion. Anyways, to answer your question, look here: http://www.rootkit.net.cn/read.php?23 And here: http://www.milw0rm.com/sploits/04012007-exp.zip When you unzip that file, and if you browse the directory containing the unzipped contents, user.exe will crash when you browse down to the point that riff.ani appears in the explorer window. So go at it and tell me if the unofficial U891711 mod works or not.

File and printer sharing are not turned on for a default installation of 98 (but they are for XP). If anyone would have the identity of these supposed IE shell extension vulnerabilities, it would be Secunia: http://secunia.com/product/13/?task=advisories Which of those 32 advisories is it? Or which of these 70 IE 5.5 advisories is it? http://secunia.com/product/10/?task=advisories Remember, we're talking about an exploit that does not require that the user be running IE or be surfing the web. Only that the computer be connected to a LAN / Web.

And why was the author banned? Yes, I would say that is a shame, given that he/she was seemingly so talented and provided the win-98 community with very valuable resource (the updated ESDI_506 driver that is, and maybe more?)

Best joke I've heard all day. Well, he'd be right, if he was talking about Windows _98_. Win-98 was never vulnerable (in it's default installation state) to network-based exploitation simply by being plugged into a lan or the net. XP was vulnerable to a total of 5 such exploits, and they weren't fully patched until SP2. 2K and XP shared many vulnerabilities back in 2002 and 2003. 98 wasn't even affected by half of the IE vulnerabilities the way 2K/XP was. Why did spam really start to explode in 2003? Because XP was really starting to replace win-98 in SOHO situations. You couldn't even connect a win-2K or XP machine to the net to download patches fast enough for them to become infected first. What a joke that was. Look up "internet survival time". On their security bullitens, Microsoft had a strange habbit of saying that 98 was affected by this or that vulnerability, but when you drilled down into the details 98 wasn't mentioned. Many IT people and the tech journalists simply never followed those details, and simply believed that 98 was just as vulnerable as XP was. It would be an embarrasment to MS if their "ancient" OS was actually not vulnerable to these exploits - if only because of dumb luck.

I've had to put that project on the back -burner for a while and hope to get back to it in a week or two. My plans are to build about 8 win-98 systems using that board, and a couple for home use too, using a pair of either 340, 400 or maybe even 500 gb WD hard drives (I have the drives and motherboards, just waiting to put them together). I'm still waiting for the availability of the Celeron 365 (3.6 ghz) which Intel supposedly started making in January. Should be able to over-clock it to near (or above) 5 ghz. The one board I've been working on so far is with Celeron 360 (3.48 ghz) and 512 mb memory. But to answer your question: 1) I haven't been able to get a PCI-E video card working in anything other than 640 x 480 x 16. I've been trying only NVidia boards (6200, 6600). I've tried 3 different boards, but I might have cross-contaminated the system by trying too many driver packages. I still would like someone to post the definative writeup on PCI-E video and Win-98. The AGP slot works great, and I've gotten Nvidia 6200 AGP boards to work fine. 2) There is something not quite right with ACPI. I don't think I can turn if off in the BIOS. If I have power-saving turned on (hard drive or monitor power-down after so many minutes of inactivity) then the computer locks up when it enters energy-saving mode (ie when the screen goes into hibernation). 3) The only large hard drives I've had attached to the system so far were 160 gb sata, and I've been able to format them (single partition) with 4kb cluster size and have been able to run DOS scandisk on them, as well as Windows ME version of Scandisk and Defrag, and have filled the drive with 1 gb VOB files with no corruption.

The word "security" is used far too loosely these days. Back in 2002 (and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 ...) MS and the tech press were telling us that XP was more secure than Win-98. But that turned out not to be true. Now we're being told that Vista, with even more services running in the background, is the most secure OS yet. Again, it's just more sugar-coated lies. Too bad you're falling for it. You don't choose Vista because of the claim that it's more secure, because that claim isin't worth sh*t. You choose Vista either because you have no choice (it came with your shiny new PC) or because you want to be thrilled and ride the roller coaster of updates, patches, and new malware threats.

I'm installing XP-pro on some new hardware, and I've pre-formatted a 250 gb SATA drive into two 125 gb FAT-32 partitions. I've selected the cluster-size to be 4kb. Here's why: 1) Sure, NTFS has file permissions. That's nice in a corporate / lan setting, but for a single user home system, who needs that? Permissions? I don't need no stink'in permissions! 2) I don't care what you say, permissions take more resources to manage, and take a bite out of system performance. Take a look at some hard drive performance measurements - FAT32 always beats NTFS 3) NTFS is more "robust" or fault tolerant. I think that's an urban legend. I've seen lots of grief over messed up NTFS drives and there is no easy third-party solution because NTFS is proprietary to MS. On the other hand, I've never seen a FAT drive that Norton Disk Doctor couldn't fix. And if a FAT-32 is really pooched, then there's always chain reconstruction (Lost and Found, which I had to use - but only once). 4) NTFS is less fragment-prone. Again I say that's an urban legend. Ask any developer with win-2k on his desk just how fragged NTFS can get. 5) If I want low-level access to a FAT32 drive or the files (for any reason) if I boot a dos floppy I can get in and do stuff (replace files, rename or remove, run a dos-level virus scan, etc). Can't do that if the drive is NTFS. 6) 2K/XP can't format a FAT-32 drive larger than 32 gb. Yea, it's always mentioned. So what? What's that got to do with the "fat vs NTFS" argument? 7) FAT is not efficient because of large cluster size. Yea, so use a third-party partition tool and set the FAT-32 cluster size to what-ever you want. What is the only real, tangible benefit NTFS has over fat-32? It's the max file-size for FAT32 - 4gb vs no practical limit for NTFS. Well, now that I've vented, I am interested to see if anyone wants to challenge any of those points...

You're wrong in at least this: A SATA drive will use ESDI_506.PDR if the SATA interface has not been configured (via bios) to be used in RAID mode (or to be controlled through the RAID controller). If you connect a SATA drive and DO NOT select it to be controlled by the RAID controller, then the SATA drive will be mapped to appear as an EIDE hard drive and EDSI_506.PDR will be used to access it. A SATA drive does not have to be used as part of a RAID set in order to be controlled by the RAID controller. Even a single SATA drive can be set such that it is controlled by the RAID controller. If Win-98 is installed on a SATA drive that is controlled by a RAID controller, it will use DOS-compatibility mode access until the motherboard drivers are installed, specifically the RAID drivers. Once the raid drivers are installed, the raid controller will appear as a SCSI controller in the device manager list. Regarding specifically what I think is the first Intel chipset with SATA-Raid support (ICH5R) I have not been able to get ICH5R working correctly in RAID mode on Win-98, but have done so with ITE and Silicon Image controllers (SATA-1.5). One thing I haven't heard of yet is whether or not SATA-3.0 has been known to work under win-98. Finally, I believe that if you remove (or rename) ESDI_506.PDR, such that win-98 won't (can't) find it during startup, then win-98 will resort to compatibility mode (DOS-mode?) to access all hard drives, which presumably means that you can then use drives larger than 137 gb no problem - but with some unspecified (or un-quantified) reduction in performance. What I don't know is if there is any other down-side to this.

What do you (or anyone else) know about XP availability through system-builder channels? Our supplier has told us that MS has told them that XP will be available "through the summer" but didn't specifically say if that would be the end or not. Many large organizations that have exclusive computer vendor contracts with Dell, HP, etc, are certainly not going to tolerate Vista being forced on them for a year or two, so I can't really see XP being totally pulled any earlier than Win-2K or Win-98 were pulled in years past. If I recall, 98 "system builder" was available for at least 2 years after XP came out. Is MS really going to pull XP before the first year of Vista is up? Are they nuts?

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/March/os.php Ok, so now what's the reason that Vista is still not appearing in these stats? Or maybe there are still more Amiga users than Vista users?

I'm not sure if I understand the answer. If I have a 160 gb hard drive, and if I format it as an 80 gb primary partion and an 80 gb secondary partition, such that I have an 80 gb C drive and an 80 gb D drive, then: 1) will I completely avoid the 137 gb boundary problem? Or 2) will a read/write past the 137 gb point of the drive (which would be at the 57 gb point into the D drive) cause this sector-wrapping problem and hence would end up causing dammage to the fat area of the C drive? (Some people think that formatting a large drive into smaller volumes of each less than 137 gb is a way to avoid this problem. Are they right?) Where is the author of the modified ESDI_506.PDR? He/She should know the answer. Bonus: If I remove or rename ESDI_506.PDR, windows uses "compatibility-mode" (which is DOS mode?) to access the (IDE) hard drives. If ESDI_506.PDR is removed or renamed, then does this 137 gb problem "go away" ?

Assuming that we're talking about a hard drive (IDE) larger than 137 (or 127.5) gb that's connected to a motherboard that has bios support for 48-bit LBA, then my questions are: 1) If the drive is formatted as a single partition (single volume) and given a read or write operation at (or just past) the sector that contains the boundary point (137 or 127.5 gb point) will that read or write "wrap" back to sector 0, and if it's a write operation will such a write dammage the MBR or the FAT tables? 2) If the drive is partitioned as 2 volumes, then does that matter? In other words, will a read or write at or past the 137/127.5 gb point result in the same situation regardless of how the drive has been formatted?

I've downloaded the modded 81.98 Win95/98/Me driver and sure it runs and sure my device manager has the correct card listed under the display adapter with no conflicts, but I've yet to get a properly functioning PCI-e card running on a new Asrock motherboard (it has both an AGP and PCI-e). The latest try was an Asus EN7300GT PCI-e card. I don't think it has Turbo Cache. When swapping out an NV6200 AGP card with the Asus PCI-e card, windows starts and identifies the new card, seems to find the driver ok, and tells me to restart, which I do. But when the screen goes black right after the win-98 splash screen, it stays black and then the monitor goes into power-down mode. They keyboard is still responsive (numlock led, etc) but alt-f4 does nothing. The only thing I can do is reset or power-down and either pull the card or start in safe mode. If I start windows in logging mode, these are the last few lines of the bootlog.txt file: LoadStart = DISPLAY.drv LoadSuccess = DISPLAY.drv LoadStart = NVARCH16.DLL LoadSuccess = NVARCH16.DLL InitDone = DISPLAY Init = Display Resources And that's where it ends. Do I need to run some sort of driver-cleaner to remove the previous install of the AGP drivers? Who has gotten a PCI-e NVidia card to work properly on win-98? What drivers? What appears in your device manager list regarding the pci-e bus?

Which is a pain in the a** if you're setting up a new install. Yes, it's good to have your own copies of those files. It's also good to have the WU site work correctly when you want to do it that way.

Funny, I had no idea this was still an issue until today. Today, I was in front of 4 different win-98 machines, 2 of which ran the Windows Update web site just fine, and 2 showed the Mac-related error message. All 4 were running the exact same version of IE. This is what I did to get the WU site working on one of the machines. I don't know what single item fixed the problem: 1) Add "*.microsoft.com" to the trusted zone list. 2) allow everything in the trusted zone. 3) rename (remove) the HOSTS file 4) delete all cookies 5) delete all temp files Some combination of the above (maybe only 1 item, maybe all of them) was necessary in order to get the WU site to work properly on one machine today that was showing the "Mac" problem. I haven't tried to correct the situation on the other machine yet.

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site. This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only. To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/. ----------- Is it no longer possible to get updates for win-98 from MS when setting up new systems?

Have installed win98se on Asrock 775Dual-VSTA. http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Dual-VSTA This board has: - Via PT880 Pro/Ultra northbridge - Via VT8237A southbridge I'm seeing a yellow (!) in device manager for this: System board extension for ACPI BIOS This device is causing a resource confict (code 15). According to the Driver tab, the provider is MS (4-23-1999) and under driver file details I see this: \system\vmm32.vxd (configmg.vxd) Vmm32.vxd is dated (modified) as Feb 10/2007. File creation date is listed as "unknown", and I can't get any version info about it. I believe that Feb 10, 2007 is the install date for win-98 on this system, which makes me think that this file was assembled or fabricated during win-98 installation or subsequently as part of device detection and driver installation. In the Resource tab, I see 4 memory ranges, but the last one is showing the conflict: Memory range: FFF80000 - FFFFFFFF I can remove the checkmark in the "Use Automatic Settings", but it won't allow me to manually change the memory setting ("This resource setting cannot be modified"). In device manager, there are 3 items listed simply as "motherboard resources". One in particular has maybe 10 or 20 entries in it's resource list, all but 2 of those are I/O addresses, the other 2 are memory ranges. One of those ranges is this: Memory range: FFFFFFF0 - FFFFFFFF Which obviously overlaps with the range for the ACPI device above. Again I'm not able to change that range manually. Another device (SCI IRQ used by ACPI bus) is listed as ok. Any ideas on how to resolve this ACPI conflict?

I've downloaded and installed that driver, but I'm still not able to get this PCI-e based NV 6200LE video card to work properly. The card shows up in the device manager with NO listed problems. When I bring up the display properties/settings, I see a dual-display configuration (which I should be seeing) but my resolution choices are upper-limited to 1024 x 768 x 256 colors - and when I try that I see that the setting is quickly scaled back to 640 x 480 before a message box comes up and tells me that I have to re-start for the settings to take effect (even though I told it not to force a re-start in another section). It's basically stuck in 640 x 480 x 16. Every time the system is booted, I get a message something like "there is a problem with your display settings" and the display properties settings-tab comes up. This is before the desktop is rendered. I get no "detecting new hardware" messages when the system is started (I used to see problems like this back 4, 5 years ago with some ATI AGP cards). The video card in question is branded as "XFX" which is aka Pine Group Inc. Ordering code: PV-T44E-PAND GF 6200LE Supporting 512mb DDR2 TV DVI PCI-E It does say that "for full 512 mb support, 1gb system memory required." Anyone know what that caveat is all about? So my thoughts are: 1) maybe I need to completely remove all previous traces of video drivers? 2) 512 mb video memory is too much for win-98 (for PCI-e maybe?) 3) Maybe other Nvidia boards (5xxx or 6800) PCI-e will work for win-98, but not 6200? 4) Maybe the problem is caused by this "turbo-cache" thing? If so, which Nvidia boards don't have it? PS: 256 mb NV-6200LE AGP board (eVGA brand) works fine in this same motherboard. So what I've read so far is that some ATI PCI-e boards will work for win-98, as well as NV 6800GT. I guess I'll try getting one of those next, but I'd like to know if anyone out there has gotten a 6200 PCI-e to work on win-98, or could explain why mine isin't working properly.

Our NT4 server has a few modems used for occasional incoming dial-in connectivity to our lan. When I changed the NIC in the server, I somehow lost dial-in connectivity to the rest of the lan (I can't ping anything beyond the NT box). The server can see the lan just fine. All the bindings look ok. What do I need to look at to restore dial-up (RAS?) TCP/IP connectivity to the lan or to the RAS server's own NIC ?

I'm surprised that even you don't see the game that Wintel plays with corps and institutions. Intel makes faster chips, and Microsoft writes apps and OS's with more lines of code, the result is that MS word can spell check a document just as fast now as it could 10 years ago. We have 8 office machines that run 98se on P4-2.6 ghz, 512 mb NVidia Geforce-4 hardware, gigabit nic's (with gigabit switch). Office2k premium/pro/what-ever. Exchange (any version) is crap, but the calendar and shared folders is what we use it for (we don't use it for e-mail messages). We run our office on software from our MSDN subscription which we had for about 5 years from 1998 to 2002 so we could put any OS on any system. Dozens of MS apps and sht that most people have never heard of. If you need to put something like 2k or XP on a worker's desk, it's because either you have more than 50 machines to manage, or because there is no trust between management and employees and you can replace trust with secure login and rights/permissions/and all that junk. Our office workers run (mainly) outlook, IE, word, excel, coreldraw, AccPac (accounting), Jana Contact (sales/contact management) on their win-98 systems. What is the biggest security threat? It's user web-browsing. How do I address that? With Spybot, spyware blaster, a good hosts file. AV software is least useful because we just don't see malware. We run an old program (post.office) on an NT box for our internet e-mail, and Symantec corporate AV runs on that box and catches any viral e-mail bodies, which have been VERY rare during the past year or so. There is no benefit, other than more $$$ in MS's pocket, to us moving to XP for office machines. Win-9x got a bad reputation back in the day when very bad drivers and systems with paltry amounts of ram were the norm. By 2001 or 2002 when driver stability improved and systems with 128 or 256 mb of ram were common, the IT people had fully moved to 2k and XP and didn't know how stable 98se really was. Do our systems see BSOD's or low resource messages? Of course not. Because what also changed was that apps became 32-bit, and all the old 16-bit stuff disappeared. The new dual-core sht is hype. How many apps are written to take advantage of them? Hardly any. Hardly any apps are even HT aware. The OS being HT-aware or multi-core aware is only half the story. The big hardware push the last few years was aimed directly at gamers. Office machines don't need 512 mb directx-9 video cards or dual-core cpu's or 1 gb ram. And now we have vista, with DRM enforced at the driver level - as if corps and institutional systems need that.

How does someone know if a particular NVidia driver download contains, or IS, for PCI-E boards? Are there 2 different driver packages, one for AGP and another for PCI-E? What's the difference between NVAML.INF vs NVAGP.INF? If a driver package does not contain NVAML.INF, then does that mean it does not contain support for PCI-E boards? And what is the significance of "turbo-catch" (cache?) Does turbo-catch/cache have some special significance to win-98? How does this: Chip Vender: NVidia Corp Device: Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) OEM: Vender Pine Technology Ltd PnpID: VEN_10DE&DEV_0163&SUBSYS_215E1682&REV_A1 OEM Device from Pine Technology Ltd Tell the driver install package if the board is plugged into the PCI-E bus or the AGP bus? What is contained here: PnpID: VEN_10DE&DEV_0163&SUBSYS_215E1682&REV_A1 That tells the OS or the driver install package that the item in question is connected to the PCI-E bus?

My point is that Vista Beta has been around for more than a month, probably closer to 6 months. Probably thousands of installations of Vista Beta in use for the past 2 to 6 months. Probably enough to have been showing up in those stats for January if not December, November, etc. Was IE7 in beta? For how long? Did the beta versions ever show up in the logs?

NTFS has no advantages. I talk to developers who use win-2k and their drives become very fragmented over time - which shoots down the argument that NTFS performs better real-time frag management. Win-98 really doesn't suffer (performance-wise) on a fast machine when fat-32 becomes fragmented. Win2k, on the other hand, on the same hardware, really bogs. You have handicapped the FAT-32 drive in your situation by making the cluster size very small (idiotically small) - 512 bytes. Even 2K or XP would not use such a small cluster size when it creates a FAT-32 volume. Go back and make the cluster size 4kb on that FAT-32 volume and then come back and tell us how slow it is. Not even NTFS uses such a small cluster size (like 512 bytes) on Fat-32 drives. Geeze. PS - can someone answer this: It is said that win-98/Fdisk/Format has a limit of something like 4.17 million clusters (or was it 2 million?) Why is it that when I try to format an 8-gb volume, that format uses 8 kb cluster size, which results in about 1 million clusters? Why doesn't it use 4 kb cluster size in that case, which would result in 2 million clusters, which is either at the limit, or is half the limit, of this often-quoted 4 million upper limit? Also: I recently created a 32 gb FAT-32 partition using 4 kb cluster size - resulting in something like 8 million clusters. I installed win-98 on that partition, and it works fine. I created a secondary partion on the remaining space on that drive (121 gb) also using 4 kb cluster size (resulting in about 30 million clusters). Norton Ghost 2003 (run from floppy boot) was able to copy (clone) the 32 gb primary partition to another drive, but it was not able to copy the second parition. The source and destination drives were both 160 gb SATA's. This was the error given by Ghost: ------------------------------ Error Number: (29004) Message: Read sector failure, result = 1, drive = 0, sectors -2084487200 to -2084487199 Version: 2003.789 (May 28 2003, Build=789) ------------------------------ Note the reference to a negative sector number. Would that indicate that ghost is using an improper (or inadequate) variable type to handle the sector number? Also - when ghost copied the first partition, it did not maintain 4 kb cluster size on the destination drive. It used 16 kb cluster size on the target drive.