dencorso

I've updated cheltomb once more. The new version replaces the old one, on post #47, just in case someone bookmarked that post. The new version does all the previous two did, but also displays the offset within the .ISO image where the Boot Floppy image starts, to help extracting it by hand with an hexeditor, or using the great PartCopy, jaclaz gave me a pointer to, way back when.

@Multibooter: I found VGACopy v5.3 here. However, when I attempted to install, all that I get is "Runtime error 200"... Is it corrupted? What is it I'm doing wrong? BTW, what are the limitations of the unregisterd copy? And one more thing... Please, Multibooter, do write a short How-To. The program is in German, so it'd be a great help for anyone interested.

Do you have a backup from before the issue manifested, Dave? My advice would be fall back and forget...

Wonderful! By doing it in that way, one prevents Windows from taking over the USB port one's booted from (and its sibling, since there's a pair to a hub), but retains hot swapping and safe removal in the other ports... Wow! What a clever way to work around 9x/ME's limitations! Thanks! You do rock!

Then you should volunteer to be a KernelEx developer. Xeno86 has just asked for help. I'd be very glad if you accepted.

@RLoew: Preventing the installation of the USB stack altogether I know how, but how can you prevent the instalation of the USB drivers for just a single port?

The used CD player you've bought is toast. If it wasn't already when the seller sent it to you, then it's DOA. Try again, and push the paper clip in much harder. It'll open... or it'll break, but you've got nothing to loose. I do believe you'll be able to open it, by hook or by crook. I *don't* believe it'll ever work OK, though. And... in case you decide to buy yet another one, do buy from someone different from the seller you've got that one from.

Have you noticed this?

Well... sort of. It seems I spoke too soon. But now I've found the answer: Go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Advanced --> Browsing and untick "Enable automatic crash recovery" That suppresses the dialogue box, after IE crashes. And then it goes to the default homepage, as required. I'm posting it here just for the record, so that others may find it, on searching. Later edit: This solution has a serious downside, in that it makes IE8 much more prone to crash or close suddenly, as descibed and discussed here.

Welcome back, Doggie! I do think we've never interacted before, but I'm happy you're back all the same!

True enough. But since: I considered the issue of the Media Byte settled, and I'm not willing to install yet another program just because of the Media Byte. After my next backup I may test it, because then I'll have an easy way to remove it, after testing, unless I decide to keep it. Did you try cheltomb? It makes changing the Media Byte quite easy, if I may say so.

Did I ever say you rock? Well, you do! Here's the progress we've made (version 2): 1) The 36 MiB floppy image had to be created by hand, but that's done (by myself), and it's available for download. 2) It was truncated. That's been solved by using DCopyNT (by Jorgen Bosman). 3) The image is empty (at least that's what the FATs say...) so it must be populated): VDM (by jaclaz) / VDK (by Ken Kato) solves that nicely. Moreover, it can also be mounted in True DOS, by using GRUB4DOS (and this is the only way to delete the Recycle Bin that is created once one deletes anything, while working on the image in Windows, by mounting with VDM/VDK). 4) Furthermore, thanks to jaclaz's script, FAT12build.cmd, many other images can be created, as needed. 5) The bootable ISO must be created. That's solved now by using The Free ISO Creator, but the Media Byte must be changed to 3. My little app cheltomb.exe helps changing and checking the Media Byte in a simple way. 6) It may be needed to edit the .ISO, once its created... UltraISO does it right *iff* (iff = if and only if) one changes the media byte to 0 (no-emulation) before editing, and then, after all is done, changes it back to 3. 7) I've used Nero 6.6 to burn the ISO onto a physical medium (a mini-CD RW, in my case)... but any burner can do it, so it's not a problem.

4053 Nowadays the version number may use four 32-bit numbers instead of 16-bit numbers, but the logic remains the same.

My guess is not well. You won't have motherboard drivers just as well. What we do know is in the compatible hardware pinned post. What's not there... well, your guess is as good as mine. In any case, on multicore processors just one core will be used.

I'm almost never really mad at you all. But if you want to go off-topic, and it won't be obviously off-topic, do say so. I understood that you meant you were giving up the machine we've discussed till now, and moving on to another one, not that you intended to do it in addition to that one. So I gave you a reality check. No anger whatever included. But if I misunderstood you, my apologies. Now, since you're doing a tricky installation, do your best to do it while you've got another machine to come to MSFN. If you'll have to reboot each time you want to read or post it'll become too much of a PITA (for you, of course), so do your best to avoid it.

Your main computer is another machine, so that nothing discussed here applies. Do it on the same machine we were talking about till now, or don't do it at all. You've got me interested in a difficult case, that I'm sufficiently acquainted with to have suggestions to propose. If you now just change the machine I, for one, will loose all interest in the matter. I'm sorry. The putpose of renaming ESDI_506.PDR is to prevent it from loading (you'll probably get a "not found" message, of course, but that's nothing unexpected). So rename it to any nonsense extension, like, for instance ESDI_506.OFF.

Rename the USB WDM drivers from "*.sys" to, say, "*.off". That should be enough. But it's much easier to just rename ESDI_506.PDR and let the machine use DOS compatibility mode. It may be faster than the way ESDI_506.PDR is getting along your chipset, right now. Do try it, you don't have much to loose by doing it (unless you're really short of time, of course).

@jaclaz: Yes! You're right, of course! I do use 0.4.4 (2009-10-16) everywhere, and that's the one I have in my main machine. But... The Eee PC 900 is an unfinished machine. I have yet to install XP SP3 in the huge 128 GB RunCore SSD I gave it in replacement for the original (and slow) 16 GB Phison SSD. However, time is a commodity seriously lacking for me, then I didn't come around to finishing it yet. It has, for now, the original Xandros that came with it ( ), Slax 6.1.2, 7pe_x86 and MS-DOS 7.1 inside only, plus GRUB4DOS to manage that mess. And, to my big surprise, I found out, just as I was posting my previous post, that I'd never come around to updating the GRUB4DOS inside, which was the latest version available at the time! Now, then, nufans.net is officially dead. download.gna.org/grub4dos is outdated and gna.org/projects/grub4dos/ has a very suspect certificate error... The page you pointed to has chenall builds. Where is tinybit's versions repository now? and there're karionix's versions too, isn't it? I've still not made sense of the 0.4.5 versions, but I do know the very initial ones didn't work for me, so I stopped at 0.4.4 (2009-10-16) for the time being, but should get back to it soon (I hope). Please do put me up to date about the repositories, because that's a recent change I wasn't aware of till yesterday. @RLoew: After getting some sleep, I see I wrote an improbable thing... Int 26 probably is implemented as just one more wrapper around int 13... SYS fails to write the boot sector most probably because it attempts to write directly to the FDD (which isn't there, of course). I didn't look at the SYS binary to ascertain whether this is true, but at least this seems to me make more sense, right now.

Well, according to your own definition, RLoew, GRUB4DOS is a DDO, since it does hook int 13. BTW, it can be used to simply mount an image in DOS, with this entry in MENU.LST: This has the effect of mounting the image, then booting again from the device it had just booted, not from the image. Yet, in my Eee PC 900 which has no floppy, when the prompt returns I then have an A: (which is the image, now mounted). Now, whatever is done to the disk gets imediately saved to the image, so that all changes are permanent. To unmount, the only option is to reboot the system. The emulation is not perfect, however, because on attempting to SYS it, the system files get transferred, but the boot sector is not written to, presumably because the emulation does not cover int 26 too. But SYS terminates without complaining, that is, fails silently. You should familiarize yourself with GRUB4DOS, RLoew... it's very powerful and versatile. There's an online manual for it which is good enough for you to get the gist of it: Grub4dos Guide. For the tests I described in this thread I used GRUB4DOS v. 0.4.4 (2009-03-25) which is now not very easy to find since nufans.net closed. So, for the sake of exact reproductibility, I'm attaching it here, just in case. But I'm being punctilious, really, because the version considered final, available from sourceforge, is 2009-03-31, so probably it would work just as well. grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-03-25.zip

It sounds like a plan to me. @HardDriv'n: What do you say? Give it a go?

You were too terse, Rloew, sorry. Would you please elaborate? Which sizes had the images? By DDO here you mean reanimatolog's BCDW 1.50Z, right? It's also possible to boot those images by chainloading using GRUB4DOS (or with GRUB4DOS --> memdisk), from anywhere, including a just booted CD-ROM. This is also something you would classify as using a DDO, so it's not that different, inprinciple. I'm mentioning it here just for the sake of completeness. And then there's also Plop, too... but that I have no 1st hand experience with. In any case, the goal would be to boot a floppy image as near 700 MB GB as feasible, but not bigger, because that's the most common size of inexpensive CD-Rs.

Virtual PC 2004 (which is free) over XP SP3 would do nicely. But I'd still prefer running on the bare hardware. I do so with an Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton), @ 2333 MHz, and have no need to slow down the processor. I run both MS-DOS 7.1 and Win 98SE just fine. Now, I knew RLoew has a machine working stably with an ATI GPU with512 MiB RAM, it's RLoew(1) on the > 1 GiB RAM list. I didn't remember it, but I think he had mentioned before having had success with a nVidia GeForce 6200 with 512 MiB RAM, but in any case, it's one of the rare mentions I've ever heard about 9x/ME running OK with any nVidia with 512 MiB RAM... there is one more on the list, Cyker has a nVidia GeForce 7950GT AGP 512 MiB working OK. I just reread the whole list looking for it (BTW, @RLoew: you forgot to report video RAM amount for RLoew(5) and RLoew(7)...), after all, that's what the list is meant for: hardware examples of known-good configurations. Now, with RLoew participating in this thread, maybe it's a good opportunity for you HardDriv'n to give it a shot, and establish whether your existing system can work with 9x/ME. You'd need the demo versions of RLoew's patches (but then there's no demo for the SATA patch...). What do you say? If you decide to give it a try, tell us so, and in the process tell us also Model and make of your mobo, and the model of the HDD and of the video card, and whether it's AGP or PCI-e. @RLoew: In case HardDriv'n accepts, would you consider creating a demo version of the SATA patch? And, considering the complexity of the task, perhaps even a special edition of the 3 demos, with a 30 min usable span, instead of the usual 10?

Two tries, and two misses! Next time take your time to read fully the Forum Index, before selecting the Forum to post in... *Now*, it is in the right place. So, please, sit tight and wait (at least one day), and I'm sure someone will help you. And, BTW, welcome to MSFN!

Well, told you so... I said "acquire" as in... buy! If you decide to go the way of the older hardware, take a look in the pinned thread about hardware compatible with 9x/ME. That said, you're always welcome!

Your specs are too high. Especially the 512 MB GPU. IMHO, it's a no-go. Even with RLoew's patches, it'd be a longshot. I've never seen anyone succeed. Sorry. If you consider downgrading to a 256 or 128 MB GPU, and are willing to acquire RLoew's patches for >137 GB disk, for SATA and the RAM Limitation Patch, then you may succeed. Even so, it won't be your average walk in the park. Here're some pertinent links for you: RLoew's Software Homepage and nVidia GeForce and Win 9x/ME - Relevant Threads The two threads pointed to in my signature are also relevant. Read them all, digest the info, and decide whether you're really willing to give it a try. If so, you know you can count on me for advice and encouragement.