Multibooter

There were just too many unresolved time-consuming problems:1) The motherboard has onboard USB 2.0 with a special ICH5 USB driver, so there would be one USB 2.0 driver for the onboard USB 2.0, another USB 2.0 driver for the combo card, i.e. there might have been a possible driver conflict when 2 different versions of the Orangeware driver were installed 2) when I double-clicked in My Computer on a connected USB 2.0 HDD, the computer froze 3) HDDs connected to the ports of the combo card were annoyingly slow 4) I actually had to saw out a metal piece from the desktop chassis so that I could plug in cables into the eSATA and USB connectors on the combo card I had originally bought the card for eSATA plus the extra IDE connection, I didn't need the USB 2.0 connectors. Unfortunately I have not gotten around to installing another eSATA card on my desktop (the motherboard has onboard SATA, so I might eventually just use an eSATA connector instead of an eSATA card). So with my 10-year-old 700MHz Inspiron 7500 laptops I have eSATA (with the excellent and easy-to-install Vantec UGT-ST350CB PCCard), but on my dual-core desktop I have no eSATA connector .

Hi Tomas, a year and a half ago I bought an eSATA-PATA-USB combo card VIA VT6421A, which came with drivers for Win98. I never got it to work with my Asus P5PE-VM motherboard under Win98. It's lying in a box somewhere now. How about getting just a USB 2.0 card, no combo card? My Asus P5PE-VM motherboard has just 3 PCI slots, that's why I tried a combo PCI card initially. Eventually I'll be getting a PCI adapter for laptop PCCards. There are good laptop PCCards for USB 2.0, eSATA etc.

I just checked the registry under Win98 and WinXP. I have found some old router MAC IDs in the Win98 registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\DhcpOptions But I could not find the current router MAC ID in the Win98 registry, probably because I have Disabled WINS resolution, so that "Use DHCP for WINS Resolution" was de-selected/greyed out for the NIC card. Under WinXP I could not find any router MAC ID in the registry.

I beg to disagree. I never had any MAC address conflicts, and even if I had I would consider my privacy a higher good.If there is a conflict of MAC addresses, it's maybe an issue in the government computers recording information. Duplicate MAC addresses could be seen by government computers just like 2 persons having been assigned the same social security number, not my problem. Duplicate MAC addresses perhaps making it harder on government computers might be those in the vicinity, displayed in the site survery, etc of the WLAN card. If I remember right, there was a story about internet traffic going thru the computers of US agencies.

I have suspended my testing for now, it's getting too dangerous. Cyberwar has started, http://www.mastercard.com has been taken out. No idea whether there are implications for Christmas shopping at ebay, the parent of paypal. The number of complete sources of insurance.aes256 available on the KAD network has increased in the past 36 hours from 174 to 316, with now 7 fakes. The number of complete sources just on the "eMule Security" server has increased from 49 to 85, so the mule is currently distributing maybe 2000 copies per day.

I doubt that you will get it to work, don't mess up your dad's computer. This is a USB printer, without a Win98 driver. How about getting your dad a good old used printer, maybe with a parallel port?I have the HP2605dn Color LaserJet (Win98 version) and it has worked fine for me. It has USB and Ethernet connectors and is the network printer of a mixed Win98/WinXP network. Getting it to work in this way was very complicated and time-consuming.

Here's the 3rd 98er : SaveLayout http://www.12ghosts.com/ shareware, can do the trick just fine. v9.70 works fine under WinXP. v7.10b is apparently the last version for Win98. I have used SaveLayout for the past 7 years to back up the desktop (100+ icons). Making a desktop backup is part of my regular backups. SaveLayout can be installed as a single applet of the whole package 12Ghosts. I didn't use the other ghost applets (except for Replace, for making global changes in a website), under Win98, years ago, they tended to make the system unstable. To create a desktop backup file (4kB!), I am using the program interface, then I rename a copy of the created backup (e.g. SLAutoSave1005.sl) with a descriptive name. To restore a specific desktop arrangement, I don't use the program interface, but right-click on the specific .sl file and select "Restore Layout". I only run SaveLayout on demand, not from the system tray. SaveLayout is a little jewel.

Somehow the file does not show up anymore when one searches KAD with the string "wikileaks". The apparent maximum of 300 hits is displayed, but not the file. I have no idea how to increase the number of files displayed for KAD searches. Apparently the KAD network was flooded with files containing "wikileaks" in the filename. The number of complete sources has decreased to 174 (from 195, the last time I checked), so perhaps they are working on it. The search string "cablegate" displays the file Ok in the KAD search. When searching with the 2 strings insurance aes256, the real file with the file ID 6EC555319422123FE9C98CE04167960B shows up, plus 3 fakes of also 1.39GB. When searching the eDonkey network with the string insurance.aes286, many complete sources are now displayed, and 1 fake file seems to have been planted recently. A current list of servers is at http://www.emule-security.net/serverlist/ The "eMule Security" server has currently 49 complete sources, followed by "Emule Server No1" with 30 complete sources.

More speculation about the file insurance.aes256 and its content may be found at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/wikileaks_assange_will_release_encrypted_TMdRdOm0JfvW4Z9rjWwLQO Whether the file actually does contain anything is currently unknown. Currently there are 195 complete sources, so assuming an avg upload speed of 50kB/s, about 600 copies could be distributed via KAD/the mule per day. insurance.aes256 has apparently the SHA1 checksum cce54d3a8af370213d23fcbfe8cddc8619a0734c and 1.491.834.576 bytes, in case fakes are planted. OT Addendum re censorship: The US government has just prohibited government employees from reading privately at home postings at www.wikileaks.ch or related postings at sites like http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/05restrict.html?_r=1&hp

I am updating this older posting. During the most recent deployment I had a 750GB source PATA HDD with System Commander plus several operating systems on it. As target HDD I had only a 200GB PATA HDD, the 750GB PATA HDDs are getting hard to find and are quite expensive. Because the target HDD was smaller than the source HDD, the -ir (image raw) switch wouldn't work. The 750GB source HDD had less than 200GB allocated to partitions, the remainder was unallocated space. I have now successfully created and restored with Ghost v11.0.2 an image of the 750GB HDD with System Commander on it, using the "-ia -ib" switches for sector-by-sector cloning (instead of -ir), but additional work was required: 1) immediately after creating the HDD image with the -ia -ib switches I booted into Win98 to fix up the target HDD 2) under Win98 Norton Disk Doctor and Partition Table Doctor did not report any errors on the cloned HDD. When I ran PowerQuest PartitionMagic v8.01 build 1312 under Win98, however, the following err msg was displayed: "PowerQuest PartitionMagic has detected an error 114 on the partition starting at sector 8385992 on disk 2. The EPBR is not positioned at the beginning of a cyclinder. If this is not corrected the operating system could cause data loss. PowerQuest PartitionMagic can easily be fix this problem by moving the EPBR to sector 8385930. Would you like PowerQuest PartitionMagic to fix this error?"-> Yes, then msg: "Success. The partition table error was successfully fixed!" This was repeated for most partitions on the cloned HDD. PartitionMagic under Win98 did fix the cloned HDD fine, afterwards System Commander and all operating systems on the (smaller) cloned HDD worked fine. Addendum: Error 114 is not mentioned in the PartitionMagic User Guide. In http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-2.html#ss2.13 it is described as follows: "114 - Logical partition does not start one head away from EPBR [Extended Partition Boot Record]. If the EPBR is found at sector N, and there are 63 sectors per track, then Partition Magic expects the logical partition to start at sector N+63."

Yes, perhaps, but not as far as it looks at the first glance. Wikileaks stands for censorship, and the topic could just as well have been "Censorship, eMule and Windows 98"I am running the mule concurrently under both WinXP and Win98 to find out whether Win98 is indeed less susceptible to censorship than WinXP. This would be a major advantage of Win98 over WinXP. I suspect that eventually the mule will be taken out under WinXP, but not under Win98. But this is pure speculation requiring a test ... Addendum: Unfortunately my internet connection has a limit of about 20 kB/s upload, so my computers will probably be near the bottom of the hit list, and neither WinXP nor Win98 may get taken out, and I may never know the answer to my test. OT: In the US there is a more-or-less stringent reporting blackout about the cables. Non-reporting or under-reporting. Up-to-date info in English can be obtained here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/usembassyfiles/

This was my initial posting in this topic. I have learnt a lot since then.1) Defragging before creating a .gho image with the switches -z9 -cns -fatlimit -szee is a useless undertaking. Ghost with these switches does not care whether the source partition is fragmented or not, and ignores the specific position of files on the source partition. The files on the partition restored from a .gho file created with these switches will be positioned according to Ghost's likings, not how they were originally arranged on a possibly de-fragmented source partition. Any optimized file positioning by defraggers on the source partition will not exist anymore on the partition restored with these switches from a .gho image. I don't routinely defragment but the Windows ME Defrag can handle it. Definitely makes sense. If one frequently restores partitions with the above switches, as is typical for a development enviroment, the HDD should not be substantially fragmented and using defragmentation software may not be useful One could actually defrag a partition by creating a .gho image of it with the above switches and then restoring it to the HDD. The resulting restored partition will have one block, with 0 file fragments, but the directories will not be defragged. 2) If one creates a sector-by-sector image, however, as with the Ghost switches -ia -ib (or -ir), then defragging the HDD prior to creating an image may be useful. Creating a sector-by-sector image, however, takes MUCH longer and should be preceded by a time-consuming prior sdelete of free space, to avoid HUGE .gho image files.

Maybe you could improve your DNS settings, both in Windows for each network card used and in your router. A list of uncensored DNS server is at http://www.computerguard.de/liste-alternativer-dns-server-vt5174.html It is conceivable that routers contain backdoors for US agencies. Maybe disabling remote firmware updates in the router may help. One easy way to reset the IP assigned by the US ISP is to change the MAC ID of the router in the router settings. It looks like the torrents for the file are dead. Torrent indexers have been seized by the US government http://torrent-finder.comThe mule seems to be still Ok. Complete sources for the file have increased in the past 12 hours from 115 to 170. It may be advisable to connect only to KAD, not to connect to any emule servers, they appear to be censored and don't list the file, and there may be fake servers. OT: the ebay subsidiary paypal has just closed/frozen the paypal account of Wikileaks/Wau Holland Foundation, to prevent donations from getting thru http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,732856,00.html

Maybe here is the answer to what is in the encrypted 1.39GB file insurance.aes256: Mr Assange said: "The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11907641 OT: 50 editors (I didn't know they had that many) of the German-language Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/ are currently going over their pre-release copy.

The safest way to browse in these directions may be under Win98.The attacks at Wikileaks are currently the top story of the German-language www.spiegel.de http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,732785,00.html The only wikileaks domain currently still up is http://www.wikileaks.nl from the Netherlands. They pulled the plug on www.wikileaks.ch which is owned by a Swiss political party. www.wikileaks.de is owned by a German political party. The US seems to act against the freedom of expression of some European political parties, they are represented in the the European Parliament and are the 3rd largest political party in the Swedish Parliament http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_%28Sweden%29 12 hours ago there were 50 sources for the file insurance.aes256 on the de-centralized KAD network accessible with eMule, currently it has increased to 115 complete sources. Download speed seems to be 100+ kB/s. The file is apparently not listed by most eMule servers anymore, only via KAD. "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops," Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow. http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2010/12/03/news/doc4cf8fb7995b3c846109322.txt

The DNS server entries were taken away from Wikileaks.org but the site can still be reached via the IP number http://213.251.145.96/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns

A file "Wikilieaks insurance file pass.txt" is being distributed on the mule. Not sure whether it's an advertising gimmick or the real pw. BTW, www.wikileaks.org cannot be reached in the US anymore. I guess I'll download 7-zip from http://www.7-zip.org/ WinRAR didn't open the file. Addendum: 7-zip didn't work. Here is a link on how to possibly open file insurance.aes256 http://www.minousoft.com/2010/07/probability-analysis-of-the-insurance-aes256-file-posted-by-wikileaks/ They suggest OpenSSL there. Another link is http://cryptome.org/0002/wl-diary-mirror.htm Any suggestions on how to try to open the file under Win98 (or WinXP, if no tools exist under Win98)?

Not so sure, I have different info, Stuxnet is USB + rootkit based, but I may be wrong. How about getting a sample of this government-sponsored malware and trying to run it under Win98? This might possibly show the lower vulnerability of running with manufacturer-provided USB drivers vsr running with the generic nusb under Win98. A sample of Stuxnet may be hard to find: "the Stuxnet worm, or a variation of the virus, had been traded on the black market" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet Virus researchers are like stamp collectors, they treat their specimen like precious stamps. "I have one which you don't have... ", and their virus collections are one of their major assets. Wikipedia did not list the current market price of a specimen of Stuxnet.

Not so sure, even if there could be infighting between that institution and the State Department.. Unless I am mistaken, there don't seem to be any working bittorrent downloads of cablegate, they seem to have been taken out, or maybe their access is blocked in the US. The decentralized KADemlia part of eMule lists a lot of sources for the encrypted 1.39GB file insurance.aes256 which might become interesting if a key becomes public. The eMule servers don't seem to list this file, strange. There seem to be also quite a few malicious visitors when one downloads Wikileak stuff with eMule, after half an hour there were 17 clients + 9 banned clients.

As reported by the German-language Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,732355,00.html Amazon has kicked WikiLeaks off its servers, possibly upon pressure by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The WikiLeak reports are readily available via eMule, which cannot be controlled by the U.S. government. Downloading them via eMule is very fast, there are currently many sources with high-speed uploads. The attempt to suppress the WikiLeak reports shows the importance, for the freedom of information, of eMule and of the de-centralized eMule/KAD networks. After the denial of service attack on the WikiLeaks server, it might be conceivable that agencies could try to attack eMule downloaders. Downloading under Win98 might provide some protection, most recent malware (e.g. Stuxnet) doesn't work under Win98.

That occurs 99 percent because the PC crashed, the PC was hard powered off or you pressed the case reset button. Thanks RJARRRPCGP, this error described in postig #31 has been bugging me for years, maybe twice a week, and the workaround was to reboot and run NDD. I can definitely exclude that there was a hard power off or that I pressed the reset button. In most cases when Win98 on my 10-year-old laptop freezes out of the blue and I then reboot, NDD displays this error message. Usually I was running too many programs at the same time with a heavy CPU load. This free space error has never occurred on my dual-core desktop under Win98. I have considered this problem to be unsolvable, although I suspect that it's caused by using a 120GiB HDD which the BIOS reports as 64GB. The problem occurs on all my Inspiron 7500 laptops, so it can't be caused by the old age of a specific hardware component. If you have any ideas on how to fix this problem, please let me know.

I have installed VoptXP v7.22, the last version for Win98, on the WinXP opsys on the same computer where I am running Win98. Under Win98 VoptXP v7.22 is blazingly fast, under WinXP slow like molasses. So when it comes to defragging FAT32 partitions, Win98 runs circles around WinXP. Win98 is the operating system of choice for defragging FAT32 partitions. VoptXP v7.22 does not lock the system under WinXP, in contrast to under Win98. Perhaps the lockup-problem of Vopt when defragging huge files under Win98 can be mitigated by using WinME DLLs. Any suggestions? It would be interesting to see whether VoptXP v7.22 has this lockup-problem also under WinME. I like old Vopt v7.22 (21-Nov-2003) under WinXP better than v9.21. I guess I'll keep Vopt v7.22 on my WinXP opsys, for defragging FAT32 partitions under WinXP, if needs must be, e.g. before burning a CD or DVD under WinXP, for good burn quality. For defragging NTFS I continue to use PerfectDisk v8.0.67 under WinXP, also for offline defragging of the FAT32 partition with the swap files,.

The last version of WinImage to work under Win9x is apparently v8.1. The currently latest version v8.50 of 26-Oct-2010 does not list Win9x anymore http://www.winimage.com/download.htm

Eventually I'll put a summary into the first posting, when most points have been covered. I assume there will many more postings. I would also be happy if HardDriv'n added a summary posting.I have been using VoptXP v7.22 under Win98 to defrag the FAT32 WinXP partition before creating a .gho image of it and am very satisfied with VoptXP v7.22. Defragging an external HDD with huge files, where Vopt v7.22 locks up the computer, is not that essential to me at this stage. Here some very interesting findings: 1) I have tested the later version Vopt v9.21 under WinXP. Vopt 9 under WinXP takes about TEN to FIFTY times longer to defrag a partition than v7 under Win98. What takes 10-15 seconds under Win98 takes 3 minutes and often much longer under WinXP. This looks like a WinXP issue, or the focus on defragging NTFS has made defragging software very slow. Maybe Win98 is an operating system better suited for defragging FAT32 partitions than WinXP is. 2) I am currently installing a lot of software, which is running under Win98, on my WinXP opsys selection on the same computer. After the successive clean installations under WinXP of about 3 packages, or 3 hours of installation work, I go into Win98 and create a .gho backup of the WinXP partition with Ghost v11.0.2 (switches: -z9 -cns -fatlimit -szee). Before creating a .gho image under Win98, I run Vopt v7.22, it takes about 15 seconds to defrag the WinXP FAT32 partition. Vopt v7.22 reports then 0 fragments and 0 gaps for the WinXP partition to be imaged. I then run ScanDisk on the defragged WinXP partition and finally create the .gho image. But, when I eventually restore the .gho image under Win98, using the same Ghost switches, then reboot into Win98 and then run Vopt v7.22 (Analyse only) on the restored WinXP partition, Vopt reports between 7-10 fragmented files. So Ghost, during its restoration of the partition image, turns an unfragmented partition into a partition with fragments. I have used Vopt v7.22 for defragmenting before the creation of about 20 successive WinXP partition images. All created .gho images restored the WinXP partition fine. In one instance, however, WinXP crashed after the image restore. Then, when WinXP was run again, CheckDisk came up with cross-linked files, lost clusters and truncated files of key WinXP and Kerio Personal Firewall v2.15 files. The restored WinXP image basically became unrepairably unstable. After the 3rd attempt at restoring this .gho image of the WinXP partition, standalone Ghost v11.0.2 created a good partition image and WinXP came up without any complaints. So if WinXP crashes after the restoration of its .gho partition image, one should not fiddle around under WinXP to get WinXP going, but instead repeat with Ghost the creation of the WinXP partition.

I view it as a personal prudent rule, not as a clear limitations. Norton Disk Doctor 2004, for example, works Ok under Win98 with 750GB disks with logical partitions up to a maximum of 240GB [=258.177.794.048 bytes]; a 240.5GB logical partition size results in a blue screen.When I used a 232GB active primary partition Norton Disk Doctor 2004 eventually displayed the err msg "Error on drive J: Invalid Disk Table in Boot Record". After NDD repaired this boot record, the HDD was basically destroyed. Partition Table Doctor v3.5 was able to recover a large part of the data. It looks like it's a problem of the specific software, not of Win98. Maybe 6 years ago the software developers didn't have large capacity drives available for testing. How do you defrag your HDDs?