Sfor
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HP D530 does have some serious problems with Windows 98.
1) To get the USB drivers installed it is necesary to disable BIOS USB support. (Advanced - PCI Devices - disable all entries for USB controllers) With the legacy USB support the Windows freezes while installing the driver. It is posible to reenable the BIOS support, after driver has been installed.
2) The Intel SATA controllers are working very slow. No fix available
3) Integrated Broadcom gigabit ethernet adapter causes system to freeze during reboot or shutdown. The fix is not to bind TCP/IP stack with Microsoft Networking.
After careful examination of the HP D530 I decided to move to HP DC7100 (almost the same, but with the Intel 915 chipset). I'd rather fight with PCIE graphics than work with slow hard drives.
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The partition table in the extended partition has the same structure as the one in the MBR. So up to 4 logical volumes are possible in a single extended partition table. Perhaps some operating systems are able to take advantage of the endless chain of the extended partition inside an extended partition idea, but DOS is not one of them. So, Windows 98 will not, as well. DOS is not able to use two primary partitions in the same time, either.
To sum it up, a theoretical endless possibilities are tied up by compatibility issues.
I saw no good and reliable RW NTFS compatibility for Windows 98 driver, so far. That's why I'm sticking to the FAT32.
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Can I also dare to ask WHY are you using such big partitions?
This particular partition stores archive video data. So, there are significant amount of relatively large files. On the other hand my driver collection sits on a 16GB partition, as there are a lot of relatively small files. The more files on a partition, the more time it takes for scandisk to do its job. In case of a "bad shutdown" only used partitions are scanned, so it is good to have a few partitions separating actual work from archives.
In any case dividing a 2TB hard drive to large amount of small partitions requires many drive letters to be used. Another problem is, the classical DOS derived hard drive partitioning allows just one primary one extended and four logical partitions, giving up to 5 drive letters. I do not know how DOS or Windows 98 would handle more of them. In my particular case I'm using 9 drive letters on two hard drives (1,5TB and 2TB).
Bact to the big partitions. Currently I'm using 3 of them.
0,99 TB on the 1,5TB drive.
733GB and 681GB on the 2TB drive.
It would be easier to make just one huge NTFS partition, but it would mean no compatibility with Windows 98.
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I did englare a FAT32 681GB partition to 733GB. The initial cluster size was 16k, now it is 64k. So, the EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition did change the cluster size, indeed.
There is more. The EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition does not allow the cluster size change. So, there is no controll over the cluster size, at all.
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While browsing Google I've found a thread about EaseUS Partition Master. An user was able to shrink a 2TB FAT32 partition down by about 600GB. It ended well, however the EaseUS Partition Master was very slow while doing the job.
So, I decided to use this application, as it appears there is a version free for noncommercial use. It did the job, correctly. However it needlessly moved the entire partition data during the process. So, it took several hours to englare 670GB partition with free space right behind it.
In any case, the EaseUS Partition Master requires Windows 2000 or newer. So, it is not a perfect choice for a Windows 98 user. It is slow, but effective, apparently.
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So far I was able to test these
Partition Magic 7
- can not resize FAT32 partitions larger than 256GB
- can not create FAT32 partitions larger than 256GB
+ safe to manipulate smaller than 256GB FAT32 partitions
+ allows to adjust the cluster size
GParted
- can not resize FAT32 partitions larger than 256GB
+ creates FAT32 partitions larger than 256GB correctly
- there are problems with manipulating FAT32 partitions smaller than 256GB
EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition
+ can resize big FAT32 partitions
- requires Windows 2000 or newer
- no controll over the cluster size
The Windows version of the Partition Magic 7 does allow to grow an oversized FAT32 partition, but it ends with application fault, when it comes to the actual job. There were no data loss in such a case, however.
It seems the Partition Magic 8 is no longer available on the market, there are also some informations mentioning it is compatible just with up to 160GB hard drives.
GParted had many versions, apparently. Some of them were able to resize FAT32, but some were not. Still I found nothing about ability to resize larger than 256GB FAT32 partitions in any version.
I have no possibility to safely test all the available partition resize software. So, I'm asking for the solutions proven to work correctly with growing oversized FAT32 partitions on 2TB hard drives.
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No, it is not.
There are quite a lot of problems with PCI-E Nvidia 6x00 cards. The official drivers do have just partial support for these cards. On the other hand the AGP versions are working much better.
What do you mean by user made drivers? The unofficial driver releases in most cases do not solve the shutdown problems, or DOS application compatibility issues.
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Well. I found significant problems with DOS applications, when using GeForce 6600 cards. Apparently Ati x600 works much better in this particular area.
Also, there are significant issues with GeForce 6200, depending on the card version. The ones with Turbo cache function will not work well, for sure.
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I was very pleased with Matrox Dual Head card, as well. But, when I started to play with linux (Ubutu) it appeared the linux drivers do not handle Matrox very well. I was unable to force them to use the other monitor output on boot. So, I had to move to a Nvidia, as Ati seems to have issues with DOS mode switching.
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I think this is a good reference to what graphic cards one can use in Windows 98: Compatible Hardware with Windows 9x
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I was able to perform the final testing. I did move the two hard drives with both operating systems from HP D530 82801EB to HP DC7100 with 82801FB controller. Now the HDD performance in both operating systems is almost the same. 6.7GB was copied in 2m 51s in Windows 98, while it took 2m 40s in Windows 2000. So, Windows 2000 seems to be a bit faster, but the difference is many times smaller.
The question remains. Why the HP D530 is so slow. Is it the 82801EB fault, or perhaps there is some other problem with this computer model?
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The simplest solution is to activate Windows 98 boot menu, instead of adding another option to the Windows 2000 menu. In the effect the Windows 98 boot menu would show after selecting it from Windows 2000 boot menu.
In the MSDOS.SYS in the [OPTIONS] section there is a BootMenu=1 switch. I t should force the Windows 98 boot menu to show. Also it is possible to increase boot delay, when Windows 98 waits for F8 key. The standard setting is BootDelay=2. So hitting the F8 key in just 2 seconds time is very difficult.
Also it is possible to create a Windows 98 boot menu through CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files.
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The USB 2.0 is backward compatible with older USB standards. In windows 98 the USB 2.0 controller does not always work correctly. To be on the safe side it is possible to disable the USB 2.0 controller in the device manager. The remaining USB 1.x controllers should do the job, forcing the USB 2.0 devices to work slower.
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I do suspect the mentioned device does not have a proper driver installed. Windows calls a "PCI Network Controller" every PCI network adapter it does not have drivers to.
"Plug and play" means a plug and play and not USB. Since the name refers to the PCI bus, it is certain it has nothing to do with USB bus.
I think you mistook the device conflict with unknown device without a proper driver installed.
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I just do not get it. The MaxPhysPage and MaxFileCache should not affect a pure DOS application, when GUI is not runnig.
As for the Windows 98 boot menu. Instalation of Windows 2000 does not mean there will be no windows 98 boot menu. In normal circumstances the Windows 98 boot menu appears after Windows 2000 boot menu. It just could be a bit difficult to hit F8 when necesary. In my case I do have Windows 98 menu forced through config.sys. But there is BootMenu=1 setting possibility in the msdos.sys, as well.
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If the MaxFileCache is too big, the DOS related applications stop running. Yo should try to decrease the MaxFileCache.
In my case on 1GB RAM the MaxFileCache setting above 800000 prevents DOS applications from running.
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I'm thinking about testing older than 6.2 Ati Catalyst driver sets. But, I have serious problems with getting these. The Ati (AMD) pages do not offer such old driver sets, not to mention there is hardly anything about Windows 98.
I can not get to the Windows 98 driver sets on Filehippo, as well. I found just XP or Vista related packages there.
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The general speed difference between the two systems is not the topic here. I did research the problem, and the HDD performance on other computers is not particulary different between the systems in question. In some cases Windows 98 HDD performance appeared to be faster. Also I do not work with Windows 98 FE, at all. So, I'll be referring just to Windows 98 SE.
As for the network speed difference, Windows 98 adds a significant lag to TCP/IP stack. The max connection speed suffers from that lag. So, in general Windows 2000 can get higher TCP/IP transfers, than Windows 98 does. On the other hand in certain circumstances Windows 98 seems to work significantly faster with NetBeui than Windows 2000 does.
According to my experiences Windows 98 is faster with high quality video decoding. Too bad it can not handle newer codecs, thou.
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My flash drive won't load in Safe Mode, Nero won't burn to a CD, keeps shutting down due to an error. Is there any way or method to save files in Safe Mode?
When it comes to getting USB flash drives working in Safe Mode, it is possible to use DOS drivers, for such a task. But, it is a road full of thorns, as it is relatively difficult to get DOS level drivers to work correctly.
The easiest thing would be to enable BIOS USB flash drive support, if available.
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I'm using various DOS tools, quite fequently. According to my experience the AGP based ATI cards do have a tendency to hang when a full screen mode DOS application is launched, or switched to full screen mode. On the other hand the Nvidia AGP cards were much more reliable in this kind of tasks.
So, when looking for a PCI-E Windows 98 compatible graphic, I started from Nvidia. The GeForce 6600 do seem to work reasonably well, but when it comes to DOS applications they gave me a headache. On the other hand ATI Radeon x600 seems to be working mych better than GeForce 6600, but it shows exactly the same symptoms, as older AGP ATI cards.
Currently I'm trying to get a HP DC7100 i915 equipped with PCI-E DVI capable graphic card.
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I do not think so. The HP DC7100 Intel 915 + 82801FB uses exactly the same BIOS naming convention. With both computer models in both Windows 98 and 2000 the "combined" mode presents OS with just one dual ATA controller with one PATA and one SATA. Both subcontrollers do show master and slave drives. It disables the third from the integrated controllers, as well.
On the other hand, the "Separate" settings prevents Windows 98 from booting, while Windows 2000 detects additional controller.
My observations are showing the same Windows 98 instalation ported to DC7100 works significantly faster with some disk related operations. In D530 i865 P4 3GHz ICH5 moving about 1GB of data by a DOS based application works several times slower, than on DC7100 i915 P4 2.8GHz ICH6 with a much slower HDD.
It could be related to a fact the ICH5 82801EB is the first from the SATA capable 82801 series, so it could have some bugs in the BIOS "IDE compatibility mode" or driver for Windows 98.
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I decided to leave Silicon Image controllers behind, when I started to play with cheap second hands HP computers with integrated Intel SATA controllers.
Also, I had an opportunity to test two dual boot HP DC7100 with Intel 82801FB chip. I found no significant difference with HDD performane (W98 vs. W2000) in case of those two. But, both of them had just 40GB old SATA drives. So, the difference in tranfer speed could be bottlenecked by the drives poor performance. In any case, I'm planning to make some more detailed testing by moving the two huge Seagate dives to a HP DC7100. I should get a definitive answer, then. For the moment, the issue seems to be related just to the 82801EB chip or just to the HP D530.
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I'm sorry, but you asked two different questions. So, I'm not entirely shure to what question the presumed answer applies to.
In any case, both operating systems are working with exactly the same "Combined" BIOS setting. To be more precise the HP Compaq BIOS does not have "IDE emulation mode". However, the "Combined" setting does seem to be "IDE emulation mode", as opposed to "Separate" (probably AHCI).
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Does your 250GB drive have a SATA interface? I do suspect the performance issue is somehow related to the SATA.
As for my drivers versions:
Intel® 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
CONFIGMG.vxd 4.10.2225
Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
ESDI_506.pdr 4.10.2230
IOS.vxd 4.10.2225
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How to make restorable backup CDs of Win98SE?
in Windows 9x/ME
Posted · Edited by Sfor
The simplest system is to make copies of Windows and Program Files folders. Quite often I do keep such copies, but with different folder names.
In case I do need to switch between main and saved windows copies all I have to do is:
- Boot to clean DOS
- start a DOS based LFN driver DOSLFNMS.COM
- Rename the windows and program files folders to some other.
- Rename the backup folders to windows and program files.
- Reboot the system.
It is possible to do it with DOS batch, as well.
If the computer does have a different OS installed, it is simpler to switch between windows copies by renaming the folders using the other OS.
I'm often keeping a few different versions of Windows 98 while experimenting with drivers applicactions or hardware.