dencorso

Well, I guess I wasn't at my best (probably too sleepy) when I posted post # 126. My apologies if I came across somewhat rough, it really wasn't my intention. I thought you meant to have the phantom optical media drives mentioned in title, while I was considreing splitting the thread instead. Of course you were clear enough. I surely must learn not to reply imediately when I'm too tired...

Thanks Prozactive! Title adjusted. I know you didn't mean to hijack this thread. And I'm not sure thread surgery is really needed. It depends on how far the phantom CD/DVD subject proves to go. The final Win Explorer for 98SE is v. 4.72.3612.1710... is that the one you're using?

I have seen this before. However, it is an intermittent problem that I cannot reproduce consistently. It only happens when a CD/DVD is loaded, and sometimes ejecting a disc that's already loaded and reloading it will cause this to occur, sometimes not. No, I don't think so. I'm quite confortable with this thread's title. What title do you have in mind? I'm thinking, however, about splitting Prozactive's hijack (which nobody could know was a hijack until he tested the patch without success...) into its own thread. I do intend it to be my *last* thread surgery for 2011! But I won't do it today. What do you all think about splitting this thread?

Wait a sec! Try this simple and reversible test: enter BIOS and disable all CD and DVD drives (set them to "None" or whatever). Then reboot, start windows and tell me whether they still appear doubled.

Welcome back, MDGx! It's good to have you around. BTW, I've sent you a PM, many moons ago...

Rloew's original patch, linked to from my post #49 in this thread, required also jds' version of the phellum patch. The combined patches should be aplied to the Q311561 version of IO.SYS. These combined patches were superseded by RLoew's complete patch, released in his post #67, then converted to a patch pattern to be used with the IO.SYS from Q311561, in my post #80, and then presented as an adaptive standalone patcher by RLoew himself, in post #98

I think he needs the RP...

Bear in mind, however, that NTFS does not have the 4 GiB - 1byte limit inherent to FAT-32, but Win 9x/ME was not designed with files bigger than that limit in mind, so that 4 GiB - 1byte is also the maximum file size Win 9x/ME kernel can deal with, regardless of the limits of the file-system being used.

Somewhat Off-Topic: The WD2001FASS (Caviar Black) is one of the only 2TB HDDs available that uses 512 bytes sectors and is SATA 300, jumperable to SATA 150, so it's viable for older boards having just SATA 150 support or for those SATA -> IDE converters, being thus a good recommendation for Win 9x/ME machines. However, they must be bought with due care, because there's also the more widely available The WD2001FAEX (Caviar Black), which also is 512 bytes sectored, but has a SATA 600 interface, being jumperable to SATA 300, but not to SATA150, so unusable by older motherboards. More info: WD Caviar Black specs. And beware of both WD and Seagate "green" HDDs, for all those > 1 TB are 4 kiB sectored.

Roxette - Spending my Time

Reliability. Good drivers for 9x/ME still available from their site. And powered by Promise PDC20268 and following chips. Promise was the best manufacturer of IDE add-on cards since the beginnings. And they remain on the razor-edge of storage technology to this day.

False positive, of course! These reputation-based detections will flag almost anything not hugely popular. You'll probably get such detections from almost any unofficial update.

XXCOPY. Get the free version of XXCOPY (you must get XXCOPY FREEWARE v.2.96.5 - xxfw2965.zip, which is the last version that works in 9x/ME). For XP+, get the latest version. XXCOPY rules!

v4 Windows Update

Get yourself a Promise Ultra133 TX2 (or Ultra 100 TX2) card. It's one of the best cards ever made. It'll give you 2 IDE channels. Your mothereboard having 2 IDE channels, plus those 2 IDE channels from the Promise card will allow you to install up to 8 HDDs. That should be enough and those Promise cards are probably selling cheap nowadays on eBay ot the like.

@tomasz86: Endlessy restating your issue will just annoy those responding and lead nowhere. Did you try the Gavotte with UsePAE=1 in the registry, but without the /PAE switch on boot.ini? If so, what happens? Moreover, did you consider asking BlackWingCat to debug the Catalyst Drivers with /PAE enabled? He probably can have success at it, and that would expand the usability of his modded Catalyst Drivers. ... When you're fast riding a motorcycle and see a high wall ahead, it's much easier to try to steer around it than trying to jump above it, and the odds of steering around successfully are way better than the odds of succeeding at a motorcycle high wall jump, no matter how good a rider you may be.

And "bit rot"... bit rot is the informatics equivalent to material's fatigue, or, in other words, bit rot is the cumulative collection of small non fatal registry errors and file corruptions that can happen on a system over a really long time. To fight it, using periodical images to fall back to, whenever something perceptible is noticed, is part of the game, but the problem are those small damages that don't lead to any symptoms, until activated by some other such "harmless-in-itself" damage. My current main Win 98SE was originally installed back in 2001, and never reinstalled so far, so I do think I'm fighting bit rot effectively, but one can never really know for sure.

It's a typo. The correct version is 8.3.0.1355, downloadable from this page. Me and my typos!

This seems strange. I'm pretty sure I've done this (with my version of phelum's patches) without any dramas. Did you immediately reboot after changing 'IO.SYS' (just in case some copy of 'IO.SYS' in memory gets reloaded and then code addresses have changed, or some such confusion)? I'm positive I did it numerous times. I usually populate my unusual disk images by hand, not using sys.com, because it *requires* physical media to work, since it relies on DOS Absolute Disk Read/Write (INT 25H/26H) services to create/modify the boot sector. In fact, it'll fail silently on any image mounted by Grub4DOS, under DOS, or mounted by VDM/VDK, under the NT-OSes. Hence I use a hexeditor to transfer and edit the boot sector (nowadays using jaclaz's excel worksheet to actually create the boot sector), then copy first IO.SYS, then COMMAND.COM, then whatever else I want in the image. It just works. And that's why I said it makes no sense. I do not doubt Prozactive had a problem and solved it by applying KB311561, but I do doubt that the applying of that hotfix was really the factor leading to the actual solution of the issue.

If the BIOS can detect the drive correctly and it's <= 1 TB, Ghost 2003 will work with it all right. Try all possibilities offered by the BIOS (IDE mode if it exists,etc.).

It's done! So... now, please re-read the full thread looking for: (i) things that clearly don't belong here and (ii) some post that is missing and creates problems for the understanding of this discussion (it's not quite easy, but it can be hunted down and moved here too), and let me know. Also, is there any other minor threads that would be better merged here? Let's finish this completely and move on, OK?

Sure. Did I ever rant about nobody ever searching the forum anymore yet? Localized Q311561... It's too bad, however that http://old.winpack.org/petr/98/311561/* doesn't exist anymore, and it's a part of the contents of "old.winpack.org" that wasn't preserved by the Wayback Machine. However, I'm sure some of our members must have saved copies of the POL8 version, and it's possible MDGx may have saved a copy of them all. Then again, in order to be able to use Petr's localized version with RLoew's complete patch, a special version of it would be required, and, since most users never noticed Q311561 IO.SYS isn't really localized, I'd say it's not worth the effort. This is just my 2 ¢, of course. Given a partition that has just been formatted, if you just copy IO.SYS alone to it, using DOS, it'll be copied as a single continuous image, starting at cluster 2 (the first cluster). Now, to put in a continuous image of any file, starting at an arbitrary cluster number, especially when the partition in not empty anymore, that requires a lot more calisthenics and patience, but can be acomplished by hand, with a good hexeditor/sector-copier, by anyone who has a really strong reason to do it (like learning how-to, for instance).

Who was actually quoting Douglas Adams Just in case of need : http://www.thateden.co.uk/dirk/ Yeah, I'm aware it actually is a matryoshka of quotations!

If so, my apologies. Then again, applying 311561USA8.EXE previously to replacing the extant IO.SYS by the patched one should make no difference at all. Yet it did... Then again, many things that make perfect sense just don't work... and, conversely, there's also a lot of things that make no sense at all, and yet work, including the Chewbacca Defense.

You might use MS USBVIEW to positively ascertain whether the device has connected as USB 2.0, 1.1 or 1.0.