dencorso

CrystalDiskMark22_9x

There are more things in heaven and earth...

Use CPU-Z to find out the motherboard info and its chipset info. Then, please post screenshots showing the CPU and Motherboard tabs' contents.

Well, there are pendrives, and then... there are pendrives. You usually get what you pay for. Note: USB 2.1 mode is when a USB 3.0 device is in USB 2.0 compatibility mode. Pen Drive Performance Tests 3.pdf

@Drugwash: Get yourself any US$ 1 USB 2.0 hub, but make sure it's really 2.0, not a 1.1 fake (you can check that with USBView). Insert it, let it be recognized. Insert any pendrive in it, let it be recognized. Copy a small file to the pendrive, open and read it, then close it and delete it. Than remove safely the pendrive. Now you're all set. The hub is not a mass storage device, so it does not create an entry in the safe removal dialogue, nor should it, in fact. So yank it out and: boom! BSOD. But it's a mild one: hit enter and you'll get back to windows, and it will be good enough to allow shut down or reboot. It never failed to happen for me, until I downgraded the USBHUB20 to 4.90.3000.11... and I've never seen it again ever since. It was the only issue I had, though, but many others reported worse issues, just like billyb... so I think how serious the issue may be might be hardware dependent (so YMMV). That's all I know about it. I found it was USBHUB20.SYS by trial-and-error. And I think Tihiy's remark quoted below is the 1st report of this issue here in MSFN, but Tihiy seems to be reporting 2nd-hand info he got from Russian forums: @billyb: With the 67,568 bytes file named USBHUB20.SYS, open Windows Explorer, go to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS, highlight USBHUB20.SYS, right-click on it, select "Properties" and select the tab "Version" and in the list box below click on "Company". You'll see: Company: VIA Technologies, INC. And also: Copyright: Copyright © VIA Technologies, INC. 2002-2005 Do the same procedure to the renamed 50,032 and you'll see Microsoft in both places.

A-ha! I bet the Diamond FireGL uses too much of the first 16 MiB of RAM, when it's in. Now let's move on to the problem with the RAM: Get memtest86+, create either the floppy or the bootable CD, boot from it and let it run 24h, no less. After that, take a pic of the screen before getting out of memtest86+ and post it here, please.

@billyb: glad it worked! @PROBLEMCHYLD: By careful editing of the appropriate .inf, using USB2VIA.inf from the VIA driver package as a guide for the list of relevant VEN&DEV entries, you can cause either of the USBHUB20s to load, without any user intervention...

Thanks for testing! So, the Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro can be put back in. Next possibility is the ethernet card. What ethernet card do you have in the machine? Or is it onboard? If so, then what's the motherboard's southbridge?

@PROBLEMCHYLD: Here's my original post regarding USBHUB20 and the VIA chipsets, just to keep things as together as possible: This issue mentioned by Tihiy is precisely the one due to USBHUB20.SYS v. 5.0.2195.6891 and VIA chipsets. While one can recover from the BSOD, the only sensible thing to do at that point is to restart or shutdown the machine.

Unless there are multiple USB2 controllers from different manufacturers, as Drugwash already pointed out, it should work all right. From true DOS, you simply rename the old one and copy in the substitute, so yes. But it cannot be done from inside Windows. And it probably will be innefective, unless you do have a VIA controller.

Aurgathor, would you try some simple tests for my hipothesis? Does your motherboard have onboard video or, if not, can you get hold of a nVidia GeForce 2 or later, but up to 4? I'm pretty sure all your problems stem from how your video card uses memory in the System Arena.

Low-speed (= 1.5 MBit/s or 187.5 KB/s) and Full-speed (= 12 Mbit/s or 1.5 MB/s) *are* the USB 1.x speeds. Hi-speed (480 Mbit/s or 60 MB/s) is the USB 2.0 speed. Low-speed, Full-speed, High-speed and now Super-speed (600 MB/s, for USB 3.0) are official but confusing terms. Moreover, USB 3.0 devices in compatibility mode report they are "USB 2.1", so perhaps the less confusing terms would be "USB1" or "USB2" or "USB3" speeds. Now, any USB 2.0 device which can do *only* Low-speed and Full-speed is either broken or a fake. In my experience (with USB hubs, mainly), they always were relabelled fakes. But, with Chinese hubs costing US$ 1 or less apiece, the risk of buying fake hubs does not worry me much. Controllers are another story... if yours has a true USB 2.0 chip, like a VIA 6202, then it's broken, not a fake. I'm positive that win XP SP2 and SP3 install flawlessly on Asus Eee PCs 701 or 900, with the BIOS set to "Finished". I've done it more times than I can count. Probably the problem existed with the very earliest BIOS versions, and ASUS never bothered the modify their manuals.

Aurgathor's machine, however is *very peculiar*, because it's the only know case one has to limit the memory to 256 MiB (that's what MaxPhysPage=10000 means!) to be able to run (when the whole world and their cousins ran Win 98SE on bare 512 MiB with absolutely no tweaks, in the last years of the good ol' days when 9x/ME were near everybody's main OS). Of course that is bound to be caused by his memory-hungry video card, and possibly also too big an AGP aperture. It should, by no means, be taken as a *typical* setup. @billyb: Is your board VIA based? If so revert usbhub20.sys to the one in VIA's USB 2.0 pack. It may do the trick.

The correct MaxPhysPage for 736 MiB is 2E000, but you *do NOT* need to set it, because you've got less than 1100 MiB. What you do have is a memory-greedy Video card, which is eating up most of your System Arena. This subject has been beaten to death recently here, but there are *numerous* other posts about it from before those, all around the 9x/ME forum, but they're almost all in the threads listed in the 1st post of that thread I just gave you a link to. Moreover, Ghost itself is a memory greedy program, the DOS version of it is made to be run under pure DOS (with just himem.sys loaded from the config.sys), not from what you reach after using "Restart in MS-DOS Mode", which is near, but not exactly pure DOS.

Donna Summer & Tina Arena - No More Tears

Ofcourse it did, and all its SouthBridges, since ICH4 do include USB 2.0 hardware support. You, however, need an USB 2.0 stack to use it. I'm positive Intel did release drivers for USB 2.0 under 98SE. Were it a Via SouthBridge, I'd already have pointed you to the right package, but I'm much less familiar with older Intel drivers.

I remembered your motherboard has a ICH4 southbridge, so I knew it has USB 2.0 capable hardware. But many boards having USB 2.0 capable hardware do boot at USB 1.1 speeds (for compatibility [with what?], I guess). And some netbooks, like the Eee PC 900 have an even stranger behaviour. There's a setting in the Advanced BIOS setup called, rather cryptically: "OS Installation", which options are "Finished" and "Start"... Now, then, if one sets it to "Start", it boots at USB 1.1 speeds, and setting it to "Finished" causes the machine to boot at USB 2.0 speeds. And this is rather counter-intuitive, because, when installing Win XP on it, one tends to set that to "Start", which causes the installation process to last for ages... The right way to do it, of course, is to install XP with the "Finished" setting from the start!!! Yet, the Eee PC 900 Manual insists one *must* use the "Start" setting to install XP. Go figure!

Uriah Heep - Sunrise

When many known-good images fail to work on redeployment, to me, it smells of hardware problems...

What we failed to say, though, is that User.exe 4.10.2231 - Q291362 and IOS.VXD 4.10.2225 - Q239696 are not fundamental for the correct functioning of NUSB, AFAIK, so that if sorbit4 makes a backup of his current Hungarian versions and then replaces, in DOS, those files added by NUSB by those Hungarian version backups, chances are it'll still work OK. It's not really quite a long shot.

Well, my idea was simply to chronometer how long does it take to boot to plain DOS (the command prompt) on a direct boot vs. booted by Plop (if one selects fast the USB option, that would do... but configuring Plop to boot hiddenusb would probably be best). USB 2.0 is so much faster than USB 1.1 that any imprecisions in the measuring the boot incept point would be irrelevant. So, either it would boot faster with Plop (meaning that the motherboard boots at USB 1.1 speeds) or it would boot slower with Plop (meaning the motherboard boots at USB 2.0 speeds), because of the overhead of using the floppy. But I ought to have suggested to Dave to use another pendrive, made bootable to DOS only, just for the purpose of this test. Lesson learned. Sorry, Dave, for the trouble I caused. Yet, we still don't know whether Dave's board boots at USB 1.1 or 2.0 speeds, and we never will, unless we measure the boot times.

I did check that before replying. The hotfixes are there, all right, but there simply are *no* Hungarian versions for those two. I wouldn't have been as assertive as I did in my previous post, if I hadn't.

Because it contains some localized Windows 98 SE files, namely: Hardware.hlp - Q242975 Hotplug.dll 4.10.2224 - Q242975 IOS.VXD 4.10.2225 - Q239696 Systray.exe 4.10.2224 - Q242975 User.exe 4.10.2231 - Q291362 242975xxx8.exe is freely available from Microsoft in many languages - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242975 291362xxx8.exe is not publicly available hotfix, you have to ask Microsoft Support for your language version 239696xxx8.exe is not publicly available hotfix, you have to ask Microsoft Support for your language version (xxx is the language version, USA for US English, GER for German, FRN for French, etc.) I suppose that the English version would work as well, but some system message will be in English. You can try it. Petr User.exe 4.10.2231 - Q291362 can be asked from MS, and has official versions in some languages, but unfortunately not in Hungarian. So it has to be localized by hand. IOS.VXD 4.10.2225 - Q239696 can be asked from MS, but has official versions in English and Japanese only. It can, however, be left in English, because it'll only exhibit messages in some rare error events.

Tina Arena - Call me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B8q_nXgNYQ

Happy birthday, Mr. Snrub!