dencorso

OK. That might be something but... how in the world can anyone know, especially nowadays, say, how many computers were there in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, before the war, and of those, how many got infected, how many times, and what fraction of those computers were running legal OSes? Not even jaclaz's crystal ball (let alone mine), in their best days, would ever yield even the vaguest estimates to these numbers. That's another type of unknowable, even worse than the ones from my previous post, isn't it? When you get served a bunch of numbers by the media or corporate sources, or any source at all, the first thing you must ask your own navel is: is it likely that those numbers may ever have been obtained in a minimally reliable way, if at all? -- Know thy unknowables...

Not even historically. That kind of data is one of the many kind of unknowable data. The reasons why it *is* unknowable are many, and we may dwell on that if you so wish. The shor version is: there no known way of collecting such data with any reliability. However, if the user base remains sufficiently high, MS may once or twice release, for an unsupported OS like XP, one or more security updates for things they come to deem may harm really hard their still supported products. Then again, they might as well not do it even so. Only time will tell.

I agree with you, because, IMO, Win 9x/Me security through obscurity is a myth I never believed in. I agree with you again, because, IMO, it would bring MS no profit at all and headaches galore. IMO, whoever believes that is -- at least -- an above-average consumer of conspiracy theories. So, don't misunderstand me: I think *no one* is *ever* safe. If you feel using Vista/7/8/+ you're even slightly safer, I have a newsflash for you: you really are not, but feeling safe may make you less careful, with all due respect. One can try to eliminate all PEBCAK. One can use a hardware firewall at the router. One can use a real-time antivirus. One can even adopt a default-deny policy, if one likes it. Etc. All that is good and makes one safer. If there are security updates, one should use them all, too. But one ought to keep multiple known-good backups stowed away in safe places, so one can recover, no matter what.

In your opinion. Now, with all due respect, in my own opinion, I'm good for at least the next 10 years: yesterday I've activated my 6th XP Pro SP3 x86 machine (two of which are also bootable into 98SE). MS will stop supporting XP next April... well, it can do that, all right. Myself, I couldn't care less whether it actually does it, or backs off in the last moment.

Passenger - Let Her Go

Make sure your GeForce FX 5200 has no more than 256 MiB of RAM onboard, too, if you want to avoid problems.

For the record: 've just installed another XP machine afresh (using slipstreamed SP3 with driverpacks.net CPU, Chipset, LAN and Mass Storage drivers) -- and duly got the expected "Error number: 0x8024D001" So I: Applied WindowsXP-KB2898785-x86-ENU.exe (the Dec 2013 Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer 6);Applied WindowsXP-KB892130-ENU-x86.exe - Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.9.42.0 (KB892130);Applied WindowsXP-KB898461-x86-ENU.exe - Permanent copy of the Package Installer for Windows (KB898461);Applied the unofficial WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe (v7.6.7600.257), using the /wuforce switch, on the command-line;Updated the browser to IE8, using IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe, the standalone package....and it just worked! So I'm marking this thread [solved], since the OP disappeared but the problem is already solved.

It's always a great idea to have robots fight for one... or, at least, act as helpers to the actual fighters, so as to reduce or even eliminate at least some "collateral damage". Then again, it's dreadful to be fought by machines one cannot kill nor stop (in different ways, the Matrix, RoboCop and Terminator, among others, muse about that, don't they?)...

U.S. Army Considers Replacing Thousands of Soldiers With Robots ... just to, so-to-say, keep the fire burning...

This is one of those occasions where things are unknowable, at least until someone comes out with some bona-fide documentation. Else, it's no more than a matryoshka of hearsay and guesswork, and gossip, of course, with all due respect to everyone involved. For all we know for a fact, it could as well have healed automagically, after Toutatis willed it so, out of pity for us all. Later note: If you're wondering whether I merged duffy98's thread (that still gives name to this merged thread) to HarryTri's "Is it a Miracle?"... Yes, I did do it... we were beginning to have too many threads dealing with the same subject, after all!!!

So, now, you've completed sucessfully your kernel32 rewrite project? Awesome! You do rock!

(a-) I wouldn't bet on it, MS is set on moving on, and leaving XP in the past, so to say. (b-) Sure. Of course.

No. None of that, of course. If at all, the fix must've been included in the Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer, KB2898785, from last month. And they (MS) were so unsure it would actually work that they released it silently and, after the next patch Tuesday passed without incident, informed about it as no more than hearsay, perhaps to reap some of the glory associated to it. I said it before and I keep saying, let's wait and see...

Did you try: wget --help at the command prompt? Mine (from 2009.04.25) replies: ...followed by several lines of help. wget -V also gives the version, followed by just a handful of credit lines.

I would not make that assumption if I were you. I don't run Kex except in one of my experimental partitions. Kex can cause incompatabilities with some programs. I prefer a clean system whenever possible. +1. I don't run Kex. Things 9x/ME can't handle I run on XP. Or on linux. Or on DOS. Or they're not for me.

Good , can you name any program (please do list all the ones you know) that has the same (or similar features) to CHKDSK (which, JFYI does NOT check the disk, but rather checks the filesystem of a volume and attempts to repair it - again the filesystem, NOT the disk).Particularly I would be interested in one that can analyze and repair NTFS filesystems. jaclaz Some presumably existent implementation of fsck for ntfs (or maybe even perhaps Tuxera Recovery?)... is there really any such app available at all? Then again...

Well, no Security Update for IE at all, that's a fact. And I confirm MS Update was indeed fast, this time around. Maybe MS got it right silently with KB2898785 (the Dec 10 Security Update for IE)... then again, maybe it's too soon to tell...

Yes. I think that's a sound plan. The 50 GB IDE HDD seems quite right as a test subject.

Yes! sync does work on 9x/ME! In fact it is one among the last 4 SysInternals Utilities that do so, according to CharlotteTheHarlot. And yes, again, sort of... MS crappy info? Sure. But unusually extra-crappy.

Most caches can be flushed by using Sysinternals sync.exe, IIRR. It might be worthwhile to run sync before removal of the drive, while on 9x, just to see whether it makes any difference.

Some very noteworthy snippets from previous posts, just to put it all together in one place: And so, we're back to the main issue, which I think is correctly identified by now... The driver is OK, but it's not working as advertised, after all. And it did work OK for other members... @Dave-H: What about falling back to a previous image and reinstalling from scratch (the PNTFS only, of course), or, better still, simply adding it by hand to IOSUBSYS and disabling the Recycle Bin for the NTFS drives it finds?

Ma... dai! Of course we do! You fully know he means to say it's unlikely it's been tampered with.

+1. And by extracting from that archive PNTFS.VxD, as suggested by jaclaz, I gathered the info below from the said VxD, which sure seems bona-fide:

Substitute by Process Hacker and forget Task Manager...

Just to avoid any wild-goose chases, rest assured that there is no Ghost32.exe (or Ghostexp.exe or GDisk32.exe) v. 11.5.1.2298. Moreover, the upper limit for any MBR using 512 byte sectors is 2,147,483,647 bytes (aka 2 TiB - 1 byte), because of the way in which the MBR is defined and because 2^32 = 2,147,483,648. Using bigger sectors can circunvent this limitation, but most (if not all) existing filesystem drivers for most existing OSes will choke with such sectors. So the biggest commercial HDDs fully usable with a MBR are 2 TB ones, provided they aren't "Advanced Format" or whatever else euphemism one may use for "4 kiB sectored".