Multibooter

If your computer doesn't boot, boot from a DOS 6 or DOS 7 floppy, then run Setup.exe in the Win9x folder. If you computer can boot without a boot floppy, it already contains an operating system.

Getting all operating systems back to work as before took about 5 hours, from a 4-week-old backup. I am away from the US currently, so I will be able to know for sure whether I lost data on the 1 TB USB HDD when I am back in the US in June. I may have made a backup of the 192GB work partition there, before my trip, but I am not sure, I usually make backups before leaving/entering the US, there are horror stories about confiscated laptops etc. Yes, a forensic .gho image would be excellent, but storing it onto a USB HDD might be good enough, viruses probably don't infect .gho image files on re-writable media. The tenga.a virus did not infect .iso, .rar, only executable 32-bit .exe files. I have a good .gho image of my desktop in the US, but unfortunately not of my old Inspiron laptop, which got infected, so restoring the internal HDD took quite some time. Creating a .gho image of the recovered laptop is on the top of my list now. I have up-to-date Kaspersky AVP v6.0.2.621 under both Win98 and WinXP, but I only scan new downloads. The infection happened very quickly, maybe 5 hours before I noticed it and ran Kaspersky, so a daily scan might not have been timely enough. Also, it was a 5-year-old virus, so a current virus signature update was not needed to detect tenga.a. I just don't know how I got tenga.a, and I suspect that only a continuously running virus-scanner could have prevented the infection .Kaspersky is actually able to disinfect tenga-infected files. Unfortunately, the disinfected files are not identical to the original files. Some .exe files are completely destroyed by tenga, e.g. reduced from 2MB to 30kB, so the disinfected file is of no use. Other disinfected .exe files/archives differ from the original .exe, but extract the identical files as the original .exe. Yes. I had a 2nd identical Inspiron laptop with me, but only with a HDD which had older software on it, of about 2 years ago. I recovered the infected laptop with the help of this 2nd laptop: I partitioning a blank HDD in a USB enclosure connected to laptop #2, inserted the freshly partitioned HDD into laptop #1, installed DOS from a boot floppy, put the HDD back into the USB enclosure, extracted .rar partition backups (from the infected USB HDD, but the .rars were not infected!) onto the HDD, put the HDD back into laptop #1, re-installed System Commander (from a CD burnt on laptop #2 from a .iso on the infected USB HDD!) Without the 2nd laptop recovery of laptop #1 would have been much more difficult.

If you installed WinXP to the G: FAT32 partition, you probably don't have to worry about your drive letters. Simply split the 105GB partition into e.g. an 80 GB FAT32 partition and a 25GB NTFS partition for huge data files. WinXP installed under FAT32 can handle huge files on the NTFS partition.I prefer WinXP under FAT32. But I have a more complicated setup, with 2 instances of WinXP installed, one on a FAT32 partition, the other on an NTFS partition. By having 2 instances of WinXP, I can easily delete and restore the other WinXP by simply extracting a backup .rar file. BTW, I am using System Commander, like LoneCrusader, and am quite happy with it; jaclaz prefers another boot manager. P.S.: I am not sure whether splitting the 105GB partition will work, because of the limitation of 4 primary partitions per HDD. I had assumed C: was primary and D-G were logical.

About 3 weeks ago my laptop got the worst virus infection ever, with the tenga.a virus http://forum.kaspersky.com/lofiversion/index.php/t7172.html and http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/tenga_a.shtml It was much worse than the infection I had 14 years ago with One-Half, which slowly but steadily encrypted cylinders of my HDD. The tenga.a infection has shattered my mistaken belief that Win98 is not vulnerable to infection anymore, in 2010. Tenga.a came out around 2005 http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog/167434325/Classical_viruses_ITW_never_say_die Tenga.a infects most .exe files it can find. It has infected all FAT32-based Win98/2k/XP operating systems on my multi-booting laptop. Only one operating system/partition, an NTFS-WinXP rarely accessed, was not infected. The most serious damage was the infection of one 192GB partition of an external 1TB USB HDD, which contained about 100GB of software downloads + installable programs, many not backed up because it was a work disk. I became aware of the tenga.a infection maybe after 5 hours, when I noticed that the disk access light kept showing activity, even when I was doing nothing on the laptop. But then it was too late, the infection had spread across operating systems/partitions, also to the attached USB HDD. I still have no idea how I got the virus, with maybe a thousand .exe files infected. Maybe it was my bad habit of double-clicking even on suspicious files in a special test windows, and then restoring a clean test windows. Double-clicking on an infected file may have initiated the infection of a .exe on another partition, of another operating system, and started in this way an infection across operating systems. Getting the laptop clean again was relatively easy, I had to restore all partitions/operating systems/directories from backup onto a clean virgin HDD. The major problem was to recover the infected installation sources on the USB HDD; some of them may have been lost for good. Here some lessons I learnt from this infection: 1) Virus infection is still a real danger under Windows 98 2) The only defense against viruses like Tenga.a, if using only occasional on-demand scanning, is a very good backup and recovery procedure. 3) Don't rely on USB HDDs as a backup storage media of software because of their vulnerability to virus infections 4) Backing up installation sources onto write-once media (CD-R, DVD-R) is still an absolute must 5) Installation sources should always be backed up also into an additional .rar or .iso file, which are not as easily infected as .exe 6) It is very important to document the actual download locations of software, in case it has to be downloaded again 7) About 10% of my time with the computer is spent creating, archiving and deleting backups. This is time well spent and has saved my neck already a couple of times. 8) A spare blank HDD, of the same size as in the computer, also comes very handy if a complete HDD has to be restored from backup 9) Maybe I should look again into UDF-formatted HDDs, as supplementary backup devices which can be set to read-only and are therefore not vulnerable to virus infection.

I tend to express myself in a more hedged way, similar to an investment banker who makes an earnings forecast of a company and who does not want to risk getting sued. In this sense I would not have nailed down myself that much, my style would rather be:"AFAIK, it may be possible that anything heavier than air may not be able to fly"

Very good link. The Total Commander plugin mbox 1.10 seems interesting, although I am not sure whether it would help with your current problem. "Empfohlen in [=recommended by] c't" sounds good, c't is the top technically-oriented computer magazine in Germany, although my personal top choice is the more popular "PC Praxis" by Data Becker. German computer magazines are the best in any language, at least during the past 5 years. I would just ignore the attachments to make matters simple and keep them in a separate searchable folder. If an archived message is of interest lateron and contained an attachment, you might make a 2nd search for the attachment in the separate archived attachment folder. This would be a quick-and-dirty approach to archiving personal emails. One of my main objectives for archiving personal emails would be to create a clean archive free of viruses and trojans. Combining the archiving of messages and attachments might get complicated when for example an important message is clean, but its attachment is infected, or vice versa. Not sure, perhaps information and dates in the original email header might get lost with this approach.

I only saw box2fox "Tool, konvertiert Netscape Mailboxen zu FoxMail-Mailboxen", i.e. it converts from Netscape to Foxmail, which is probably not what you need. Very interesting find, actually Aid4Mail v1.994 http://www.aid4mail.com/specifications.php It seems to be able to read Foxmail email. As output, however, it apparently can only create .EML message files, which contain embedded attachments http://filext.com/faq/decode_eml_files.php The RFC-822 files I got from my Eudora mailboxes with Emailchemy were plain .txt, without embedded attachments.You might have to get yourself Aid4Mail to convert your Foxmail emails to a more standard format, and Emailchemy to create a searchable folder with .txt message files. For me, the main advantage of using a searchable folder of .txt message files would be the absence of a learning curve with Win98 Find or WinXP Search. BTW, TweakUI can get rid of the annoying dog with the wagging tail in WinXP Search.

Which one is that?Here 2 notes about Emailchemy: 1) I view Emailchemy as a program comparable to Winzip or WinRAR, but Emailchemy handles containers of email messages, while Winzip or WinRAR handle containers of files. The various .mbx email containers created by my old Eudora v3.05 are uncompressed, just a concatenation of many tiny messages. One of my .mbx files, for example, is 7.1MB and contains 1190 concatenated email messages. The 1190 message files extracted as .txt take up 20.1 MB (FAT32, 16kB cluster size). The 1190 extracted .txt message files put into a .rar file with normal compression use 2.6 MB. That single 7.1 MB .mbx file, compressed into a .rar file, uses only 392kB. If you plan to use WinXP to search your database of extracted message files, it might be preferrable to create a .zip file from the extracted .txt message files, not a .rar file, since WinXP Search, in contrast to Win98 Find, can search inside .zip files. 2) I have not yet checked whether Emailchemy handles PGP-encrypted messages correctly. Also, I have used Emailchemy only to extract individual .mbx files, not all 50+ .mbx mailbox files plus attachments in a single step; extracting a single mailbox causes a warning by Emailchemy about possible errors (maybe because of references to attachments which can't be found???), but the output of Emailchemy looked fine.

Re: topic title "[9x/Me] Email Archiving". Emailchemy is Java-based and works apparently under many operating systems, e.g. Linux, not just 9x/Me. But maybe this topic should stay under Win9x since Emailchemy might be a useful tool to access, under Linux, old emails created with old Win9x software.

Hi Jake,Emailchemy http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/index.html might help you. 1) I had used Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 under Win98SE to convert emails from old Netscape Communicator v4.8 to old Eudora v3.05 (of 1997). Older Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 works fine on my 10-year-old Inspiron laptop with 512MB RAM; for the latest version the author's website recommends a minimum of 1GB of RAM. 2) Just recently I have used Emailchemy to disinfect old virus-infected Eudora email .mbx files; Kaspersky Anti-Virus is not able to disinfect individual emails in a .mbx container, you can only delete the whole mailbox containing thousands of emails. Emailchemy can convert an .mbx mailbox file into "RFC-822 message folders" (actually .txt files), one .txt file for each email message. To clean up an infected mail box, I: - converted the .mbx file with Emailchemy to about 4000 individual RFC-822 message .txt files - checked with Kaspersky the extracted 4000 .txt files (some viruses/trojans already got deleted during the conversion) - opened the infected .txt message files with TextPad (Notepad doesn't work; WordPad doesn't work either, it reacts to embedded MS stuff) and either manually deleted trailing junk in the .txt file (i.e. the trojan), or I just deleted the infected .txt file - after all infected stuff was removed, I converted with Emailchemy the 4000 message files (.txt) back into a Eudora .mbx file. The basic approach is: email container (e.g. Eudora .mbx) ==> convert to many individual .txt message files ==> fiddle around with the individual .txt message file ==> convert back to email container BTW, the email container re-created from individual .txt message files is about 20-30% bigger than the original email container, but it works. Infected messages are a major problem when archiving emails, virus scanners are just not up-to-date. For example, a couple of years ago, Kaspersky didn't find anything bad in an old .mbx mail box. Now, with the current virus signature update, Kaspersky detects some infected messages, which it didn't find earlier. For easy future disinfection of email messages containing currently not yet detected trojans/viruses it may be preferrable to archive emails as individual RFC-822 .txt message files and put them into a .rar file. I don't want to archive infected stuff. 3) Emailchemy has also helped me repair corrupt Eudora mailbox files (old Eudora v3.05 would just become "not responding" with them), by letting me extract the messages of a mailbox as .txt files. I could then edit with TextPad the individual .txt files. All my corrupt .mbx Eudora mailbox files were caused when old Eudora v3.05 somehow created inside of the .mbx file a corrupt email message containing many email messages, instead of a single message. The mailbox corruption was cleaned up after I: - extracted with Emailchemy the bad message file as a .txt file - manually split it up in TextPad into many files with only a single email message - saved the split up .txt files under any name (e.g. msg001.txt etc) - converted the split up files plus all the other good RFC-822 message files back into a single .mbx file. 4) You could create a searchable database of your emails by converting your emails with Emailchemy into thousands of little RFC-822 .txt files, and then simply use Win98 Find. You are using Foxmail v5.8, which is not on the list of email file formats which Emailchemy can read; you may have to export your email files in a format which Emailchemy can read. Emailchemy assigns the date (YearMonthDay-Time) as the initial part of the file name of each RFC-822 .txt file, e.g. "20030629-1355 eBay Item Purchase Titan Notebook Cooler Item 1234567890.txt". Message .txt files, which don't contain the date (e.g. .txt files manually repaired/extracted from a corrupt Eudora .mbx mailbox file where the date was somehow missing) are assigned the current date by Emailchemy.5) One of my long, ongoing projects is to archive old stuff, like old floppies, old CDs/DVDs, old photos, old LPs. So archiving old emails could become also part of this archiving effort, although there is no time-pressure to archive old emails. Unlike old floppies, old CDs, old photos or old LPs, old emails don't decay.

Thanks a LOT risk_reversal. Looks like a very useful card. Are there any Win98/Vista/Linux compatible WLAN cards, with detachable antenna AND the a-frequencies? That would be an ideal WLAN card. Edimax apparently has no a/b/g dual-band WLAN cards.

Yes. It's very important to look at firmware revisions when buying add-ons for Win98. Very often manufacturers change chips, but keep the old packaging and model number. I assume D-Link sold 4 completely different beasts under the same model number, and for version D there is no manufacturer-provided Win98 driver. Unfortunately the firmware revision is often not visible on the box, only inside, on the sticker of the device.

Nice that you give your computers a name, like Jerry Pournelle many years ago. Interesting, but I understand very little about video cards, I am not into games, I even had to look up some info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing I am using a bfg 7800 GS video card http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr78256gsoc.aspx , which software would run (better) with your old card? Having a modern Win98 computer is a little luxury. My guess is that you'll have to budget $500 for it. The box and the power supply may prove to be the only useful free components of your Win98 system. Eventually I'll get an X6800 CPU for my Win98 system, but they still sell for around $200. I guess your objective is to build yourself a computer which works with your old video card. The only advice I would dare to give you is to get a newer motherboard fully compatible with Win98 AND newer operating systems, like the excellent Asus P5PE-VM (dual-core support for multi-booting, AGP, max 2GB RAM, only 1 floppy drive, only 3 PCI slots, onboard Gigabit Ethernet controller). You'll save yourself a lot of time and hassles, like looking for drivers. I would still consider an inconvenient long ethernet cable. On my Win98 computer I can watch nicely foreign TV via the internet when my Win98 machine is connected vie Ethernet cable. When connected via slow g-speed WLAN, movies don't display properly. I haven't tried brand-specific super-g yet, since devices of different brands (PCI-cards, router, Nintendo, PS3, Win98/WinXP computers, Asus netbook) connect to the home WLAN. WLAN with g speed is no problem under Win98, just get a PCI WLAN card which has a Win98 driver. I am happy with the D-Link DWL-AG530, firmware revisions A3 and A4, an external antenna can be screwed on. Netgear has removed all their Win98 drivers from their website, but D-Link drivers are still available, albeit hidden: ftp://ftp.dlink.com/Wireless/dwlag530/Drivers/ It is difficult, however, to find WLAN cards which have drivers for Win9x/XP/Vista AND Linux, anybody has some suggestions?

It's the volume of downloads. My eMule computer has been up and downloading now for 5 days 14 hours, under Win98, without crashing. Since I have several operating systems on my computer, I can scan under Win98 the WinXP partition (FAT32), and under WinXP the Win98 partition, which should be just as effective as removing the HDD, but more convenient. Basically no, because most of the stuff is infected anyway Different content. Bittorrent has mainly new stuff, the Mule has also a lot of new stuff, but about 100 times more older and rare/hard to find stuff than Bittorrent. The Mule uses ed2k and Kademlia; ed2k accounts for only about 20% of the titles, Kad for about 80%.BTW, the emule software has been downloaded 500 million times, with the last version 0.49c alone 32 million times http://sourceforge.net/projects/emule/files/ At this very moment there are 1.2 million people connected to the 4 eMule servers in my pruned server list. It may be that the Mule is past its peak, v0.49b had 48 million downloads. http://sourceforge.net/?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000

I only use an anti-virus for checking stuff downloaded with eMule under Win98. I have a dedicated eMule computer, running continuously (current uptime: 4 days, 15 hrs). The incoming downloads are processed on another computer, so the virus-check could indeed be done there under WinXP. Running a virus-check under Win9x may eventually become just as unnecessary as running a virus-check under DOS. I haven't run a complete virus-check under Win98 for about a year, with no ill effects.Nevertheless it's re-assuring to know that I could run a virus checker under Win98. Kaspersky currently detects in 100 software files downloaded with eMule about 60 infected files. When Kaspersky is run a month later again, on the ??clean?? 40 files, it will detect another 5-10 infected files which it didn't detect a month earlier. Anti-virus software is indeed far behind in their detection of new malware.The infection rate of eMule software downloads has jumped from about 20% to currently about 60-70% over the last 6 months. 6 months ago the largest eMule server had links to about 25 million files, today it links to 83 million different files. This sudden jump by about 60 million files corresponds to the jump in the infection rate. Perhaps some organization has been trying to poison the eMule network by pumping 60 million different infected files into it.

The error seems to be a nasty one, perhaps it has something to do with installing software in a network/via the internet. Perhaps it's an installer error msg, when Avast tries to install a newer software component which might not work under Win9x anymore, but that's just a wild guess. Ancient Kaspersky Anti-Virus v4.5 died on me during an update with an incompatible component, about a year and a half ago, I had to upgrade to v6.Maybe this helps: http://forums.kustompcs.co.uk/showthread.php?t=33805 I use Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6, not Avast, so my comment here may not apply. In the Kaspersky update settings I have de-selected the option "Update application modules", to make sure that Kaspersky doesn't try to install a newer software component which might not be Win98-compatible. If Kaspersky AV gives me a cryptic error msg, I uninstall it, then re-install it. Since I know how to back up the license key generated during activation, re-installation is risk-free for me. Make sure you don't lose your license key during the fiddling around.

10-20% of Google search results, produced with "site:msfn.org" in the search string, currently display the default page "http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?" instead of the content one is looking for. By selecting "Cache" the correct page gets displayed. What has been the impact of the upgrade to v3.0.5 on the visibility (search engine positioning) of msfn.org (Google and Bing)?

You're between a hard place and a rock. A low backward compatibility is the hallmark of buggy and mediocre software: Compatible only with other software with large market share, saving support$. And when the backlog of bugs to be fixed gets too big and too difficult to solve, a new version is released, together with an end-of-life announcement of the old can of worms.A high degree of backward compatibility is the characteristic of top products. When a hardware or software product, for example, has listed both Win98 and Vista/Win7 compatibility, you can buy it nearly blind out of the box, it's most likely an excellent product. Beyond Compare, for example, is an excellent program, and v2.5.3 works with Win95 thru Win7x64; they are even supporting v1 for Win3.1. And you can have both v2 and v3 installed at the same time. The lack of backward compatibility of IP Board would raise a red flag with me; over the intermediate term I would look at alternatives. I would even venture to predict that v3 will prove to be more buggy than v2. This may confirm my comments aboveDon't get discouraged by the difficulties and keep up the good work!

I am using Opera v9.64 and Firefox 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE on my 10-year-old Inspiron 7500 laptop, 700MHz, 512MB RAM. Firefox on this old laptop has no problems with scripts at msfn.org, even when 11 other websites are open in other tabs. The fan, however, is continuously on, and CPUIdle shows heavy CPU usage.I don't like the new appearance of the forums of msfn.org either, there is too much spacing between the lines. Somehow the readability of the forum pages has decreased substantially.

No. IsoBuster v2.5.5.1 of 8-Jul-2009 and another v2.5.5.1 of 16-Jul-2009 install Ok under Win98SE, but when you try to run them under Win98SE you get the following err msg: "Error Starting Program. The ISOBUSTER.EXE file links to missing export KERNEL32.DLL:GetFileSizeEx". The same for IsoBuster v2.5.5.0 Beta of 26-Jun-2009. No, I am using only plain-vanilla Win98SE, so I don't know whether IsoBuster v2.5.5.1 or higher work under KernelExv2.5.0.0 is definitely the last version which works under Win98SE. There are 2 different releases of v2.5.0.0, one of 19-Dec-2008, the other of 23-Dec-2008, both digitally signed, their only difference is possibly only an updated blacklist table. IsoBuster is the best protected shareware I have seen . The PRO functionality of the registered v2.5.0.0 (e.g. extracting files from an InCD CD-RW) works fine under Win98SE. IsoBuster http://www.isobuster.com has a lot of advanced special uses. It is very useful as an InCD reader under Win98 in my current project to archive old CD-RWs. I had gotten rid of Nero InCD v4.3.20.1 under Win98 years ago, with a special Nero InCD-CleanTool, because Nero InCD made my Win98 system unstable, and was left with no capability to access InCD CD-RWs under Win98. IsoBuster does not make Win98 unstable.

The current v2.7.0.0 of IsoBuster http://www.isobuster.com/ does NOT install under Win98 anymore. What's the last version/build of IsoBuster which still works Ok under Win98?

I have just created with UltraISO two .iso images of another CD containing out-of-spec directory names (e.g. a dot in the directory name), one created under Win98 and the other created under WinXP. When mounted on 2 virtual drives with Alcohol, Beyond Compare found both .iso images to be identical. So the phenomenon of these 3 directories "5.5DDocs", "5.6Addendum" and "5.6Tutorial" on my backup HDD being assigned different names by Win98 and WinXP is probably NOT caused just by a dot in the directory name. Maybe it is caused by the embedded blanks in the DOS directory names "5 ~1.5dd", "5 ~1.6ad" and "5 ~1.6tu". I guess the embedded blanks were automatically created as fillers because the first part of the directory name consists of a single character "5", and the suffix exceeds 3 characters. I don't know how the embedded blanks got into DOS directory names on my backup HDD. When, for example, I create under Win98 the folder "1.junk", Win98 assigns it the DOS folder name "1~1.JUN", without embedded blanks. Maybe it has something to do with ISO Level 1 (8.3 characters), it can't be coincidence that in each of the 3 directory names 4 blanks were embedded, giving a total length of 8 characters to the first part of each directory name. Am I missing a MS bug fix on my Win98 computer? The whole problem looks like a MS bug, which was fixed under WinXP.

What low-level dd-like copying tool would you recommend for creating a .iso image under Win98? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_unix

I am currently archiving about 300 old software CDs and have come across several problems. 1) Archiving software CDs with out-of-spec filenames A software CD, burnt around 1998, contained directory names which were not legal under ISO 9660. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 I assume it contained 3 subdirectories with dots in their directory names: "5.5DDocs", "5.6Addendum" and "5.6Tutorial". Unfortunately I cannot check the CD anymore, since the CD has gone bad in the meantime, with silvery flakes peeling off the CD. Before the CD went bad I had made under Win98 an Ok file copy with Windows Explorer (and also with Unstoppable Copier) to a USB HDD of all files and directories on the CD. When I looked under Win98SE at these 3 subdirectories on the USB HDD they had the long file names "5 ~1.5dd", "5 ~1.6ad" and "5 ~1.6tu" (each with 4 embedded spaces, not correctly displayed here, and the long file name and the DOS file name were identical). Neither WinME ScanDisk nor standalone Norton Disk Doctor 2004 complained under Win98SE about the long file names. When I looked under WinXP SP2 at these 3 subdirectories on the USB HDD they had different long file names: "5.5DDocs", "5.6Addendum" and "5.6Tutorial". The only explanation I can think of why Win98 and WinXP assign different long names to the same directories is that when Win98SE stored an out-of-spec filename on the USB HDD, it somehow marked the filename as bad, and subsequently used the DOS name as LFN. In any case Win98 must have stored on the USB HDD the out-of-spec directory name of the CD, since WinXP reads it from the USB HDD. I came across this problem when I made a binary compary with Beyond Compare under WinXP. I compared under WinXP the file-copy backup on the USB HDD against a mounted .iso image created under Win98 of the files on the USB HDD: they did NOT match. WinXP read the directory names on the USB HDD as "5.5DDocs" and the corresponding directory name in the mounted .iso (created under Win98) as "5 ~1.5dd". The assigning by Win98 and WinXP of different long names to the same folders has 2 major implications: 1) Software backed up under Win98, from a CD with out-of-spec long names, into a .iso (or also as .rar, etc.) or even as a Windows Explorer file-copy will NOT work. A program looking for "5.5DDocs" will not look for "5 ~1.5dd" 2) Because of this out-of-spec problem, backup copies of CDs, made under Win98 may not be reliable. It may be preferrable to make backup copies of CDs under WinXP instead of under Win98. This 12-year-old CD may be an example to explain the somehat cryptic text in the Wikipedia article: "... most operating systems which can read ISO 9660 file systems have no problem with out-of-spec names. However, the names could appear wrong to the user." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 Is there some software which checks whether a CD (or HDD) contains out-of-spec file or directory names?

I beg to disagree. There may be some issues when using huge files < 2GB, or files between 2-4GB with the 4GB file-size patch.Under Win98SE on my desktop, which has 2GB RAM installed, I have set the swap file to 3888 MB fixed (Minimum=Maximum), just to be on the safe side when handling huge files.