Multibooter

Dave's system and nusb will then most likely work, but what about his external devices? I have a lot of external devices for my laptop which are entered under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum. Re-installing the software and drivers for my external devices would be quite time-consuming (PCCards [sCSI, USB 2.0, Ethernet], USB devices [Printer, scanner, USB DSL-modem using NDISWAN], parallel port devices [iomega zip, Jaz Traveller parallel-to-SCSI converter, Micro Solutions floppy disk drive, parallel port printers] and SCSI devices [iomega Jaz/zip]). Dave is lucky if he doesn't have that many external devices.If Dave's computer works with an old serial mouse, then the corruption of his system may be limited to USB/SCSI. Hopefully Dave can solve his problem, but if nothing should work, Dave has then a 3rd alternative: installing a clean 2nd Win98 opsys with nusb, and continue using his original Win98 opsys for everything which does not involve USB.

Your system corruption seems to possibly include now a 3rd USB device, the USB mouse. What happens if you use an old serial mouse? dencorso's suggestion is the right way to go. @dencorso: Did you mean HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum ? Or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\USB and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\USBSTOR ? On the other hand, wiping out all the hardware currently installed may be useful house-cleaning. I have never done that yet on my system, I am not sure what the impact on other software installed in my system would be, e.g.:- Alcohol with a virtual drive which creates an entry "VAX347S SCSI Controller" in Device Manager - Acronis True Image, which has an entry in Device Manager under Acronis Device - the printing software cum driver of my HP2605dn Color LaserJet, which renames the whole USB category in Device Manager to "HPP EWS" Dave's system looks like in trouble and a complete hardware-oriented house-cleaning is a thorough step most likely obviating the need to re-install Win98. @dencorso, Please apologize my constant comments here. This topic is very important, it might even be renamed to "How to repair a failed nusb installation".

Do you use a USB mouse or a USB keyboard? I don't know how to uninstall nusb on my system. Renaming Usbstor.inf and usbstor.pnf only de-activates nusb. The entry in Add/Remove "Remove Unofficial Universal USB 2.0 Stack" is not a complete uninstall of nusb. In order to make an uninstall of nusb, I make a complete system restore (including dlls, \INF\ etc) to a state prior to the installation of nusb, which is quite easy on my system. The author of nusb should add a text like "Before installing nusb, you MUST make a complete system backup" on the first installation window of nusb. During my fiddling around with nusb I made maybe 50 complete system restores @ 10 minutes, with the method described above. I am also using my own little method for installing nusb.Again, nusb is an excellent piece of software once you get it going correctly and I have switched over from manufacturer-provided drivers to nusb.

You have just detected the 1st corruption on another USB device. I suspect that there may be more problems hiding. Does ScanDisk or NDD work Ok on all of your USB mass storage devices, especially after safely-removing the USB devices (via the system tray icon) and then reconnecting them? Do 2 USB mass storage devices connected at the same time work properly? Before fiddling around any more you might also create a restore point (see below). Here 2 easy tricks:1) download the Genesys USB driver from http://www.hama.de/webresources/drivers/00...350_win98me.exe and install it; it can be uninstalled easily again via Add/Remove. This driver has helped me to "break the neck" of nusb when I was fiddling around with nusb. (If you lateron decide to re-install nusb again, uninstall the Genesys driver via Add/Remove before installing nusb) 2) if this doesn't help, then rename \Windows\INF\USBSTOR.INF and USBSTOR.PNF to anything, e.g. to: Usbstor.inf.deactivated & usbstor.PNF.deactivated. Then uninstall and re-install the manufacturer-provided driver of your USB pendrive. I use the following method to create a restore point under Win98: I go into another Windows operating system (e.g. WinXP) on my computer and rar up \Program Files\ and \Windows\ of the Win98 system into a single .rar file. When I want to restore Win98, I again go into WinXP, delete \Program Files\ and \Windows\ on the Win98 partition and then unrar the .rar file there, re-creating \Program Files\ and \Windows\. To create a restore point takes about 30 minutes on my old 750MHz laptop, to restore Win98 takes less than 10 minutes. When I install new software I try not to install it to the default \Program Files\xxx\, but to E:\xxx\, this keeps \Program Files\ small for faster system backups and restores. If the 2 tricks above don't work, I don't know of a quick and easy fix.@dencorso: I guess we posted at about the same time. I would still try the trick with the installation of the genesys driver first, even if it doesn't solve the underlying corruption problem. Your suggestion about a clean installation of nusb addresses the underlying corruption which Dave will eventually have to fix. Since it looks like Dave doesn't have a recent backup, his best long-term choice is to follow your suggestions and make a clean installation of nusb.

Hi Dave, as I had suspected in my first reply: Try to click on the Refresh button in Device Manager, maybe the drives will then show up in My Computer. If that doesn't help, make a system restore, try to uninstall the old cardreader driver + any other USB stuff, then install nusb + see whether it works.On my system an old and forgotten USB driver of an external Micro Solutions DVD burner, discarded long ago, had caused problems. I also suspect that an old forgotten utility called "Iomega Backup", for Iomega Jaz drives (SCSI), might have caused strange problems on my system when nusb was installed without removing this utility beforehand. Maybe not only old drivers and devices, but also unruly applications may possibly interfere with nusb. I also removed SCSI drivers and devices; I got rid of the driver etc of an old Umax Astra 1200S SCSI scanner, for example, which I had disposed of years ago, and which had no uninstall routine in Add/Remove. In order to uninstall that Win95-era scanner, one would have to connect the scanner to the computer, and then uninstall it via the Control Panel, but this is kind of hard to do without the scanner. A little while back I had a multiple-drive-letter problem, with several drive letters appearing in My Computer and referring to the same device, e.g. 8 drive letters instead of 4. Maybe your problem is related, only a little different, i.e. zero drive letters instead of 4. My multiple-drive-letter problem was never resolved, until I restored the system to a state of 18 months earlier. Recently I somehow got another multiple-drive-letter problem out of the blue, when I used 2 Iomega SCSI Jaz drives, one connected to the parallel port via an Iomega Jaz Traveller cable (=a SCSI-to-Parallel converter), the other connected to a CardBus slot of my old laptop via an old Adaptec SCSI 1460A PCMCIA card. I didn't try to find the cause of the multiple-drive-letter problem (i.e. 3 jaz drive icons in My Computer instead of 2), I just made a system restore, but even that didn't resolve the multiple-drive-letter problem, I suspect that the driver of the Iomega Jaz device wrote something somewhere in the jaz drive. After some fiddling around, this multiple-drive-letter problem was gone, but I have no idea why. Iomega has stated somewhere on their website that there is a multiple-drive-letter problem with their Jaz drives.

Hi Dave, this means that your card reader requires a driver for Win98, but the manufacturer does not provide one, i.e. the card reader will most likely not work under Win98 unless you have nusb 3.3 properly installed, with no stuff interfering with nusb. Since nusb didn't work for you, it looks to me like you have somehow corrupted your Win98 system during your attempts to get the USB card reader going. nusb 3.3 is a marvellous program and it is extremely unlikely that your new card-reader will not work with it, provided you do a lot of time-consuming footwork before installing it. WinME has a built-in USB driver, but not Win98SE. 1) If you can, restore your system to a point BEFORE you started fiddling around with the card reader and nusb. Your system has most likely become a little corrupted and all your other USB and SCSI devices may be impacted. nusb is not just a little driver, it's a major system update which is very hard to reverse, so a system restore is the easiest solution.2) To save you a lot of time: Return the card reader and get one which lists Win98SE on its system requirements AND which has a driver CD in the packaging. Quite frequently Win98 drivers from a website don't work with a card reader because the card reader has a new chip inside. There should be still some Win98 compatible card readers on the market, just look for them. 3) If you freshly install Win98SE, nusb 3.3 is the easiest and best choice. On a Win98SE system with a lot of stuff on it already, and many devices already detected, a manufacturer-provided driver is the easiest choice, nusb requires a lot of uninstalls prior to installation. 4) I am using nusb 3.3 on my main Win98 computer, and am very content with it. I have switched over from manufacturer-provided drivers to nusb about 6 months ago, but this was a VERY time-consuming project because I have over 150 software packages installed on my Win98 machine, with maybe 30-40 different external hardware devices.

Hi jaclaz, very interesting to see that this Win98 slip-streaming project died about 6 months after Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 98.

I am using WinRAR to create archives, I have no experience with makecab. When I repeat the archive creation selecting a folder of files, WinRAR produces 2 identical .rar files. When I repeat the archive creation selecting a folder plus files, WinRAR produces 2 different .rar files, possibly because Windows changes the file access date when I select a file for inclusion in the .rar archive. I have been amazed to see that when I burn with Nero a CD from an .iso file created by UltraISO, and then make again an iso image with UltraISO of the CD just burnt by Nero, the resulting iso file will be larger than the original iso file, but the files in both iso images are identical. Pretty soon WinXP will be a legacy operating system, just like Win98. And legacy operating systems have something in common: It takes a lot of effort and special tools to get them to work on new hardware.The installation of WinXP on an Asus Netbook, which has no floppy drive A:, has shown me that installing WinXP on new hardware starts to get as difficult as installing Win98 on new hardware. Without a tool like nLite I would not have been able to install WinXP on the Asus 1000HE netbook with an AHCI BIOS setting. In 2-3 years from now I expect that it will be just as difficult to find WinXP-compatible hardware, WinXP drivers and WinXP-compatible software, as it now for Win98. If you plan to stay with WinXP, you might look at the Win98 forum http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=8 to get a glimpse of the problems the few remaining Win98 users are currently facing.

I have recently come across another old program which had also raised a red flag with me, TeleDisk (see http://www.msfn.org/board/2-t136856.html posting #15, TeleDisk can create images of DOS and CP/M floppy disks under Win98 [TeleDisk v2.23 also works Ok under WinXP if you select as Diskette Controller Interface "BIOS" instead of "Direct"]): When I repeated with TeleDisk to make a disk image of the same floppy, the resulting disk image differed a little from the previous disk image, even the file size of the created image file differed. Making 3 images of the same floppy disk resulted in 3 different image files, but the floppies re-created from these differing image files were identical.The floppy disk images usually just differed by a few bytes in the header, the data area looked identical. At the time I thought that they might have different encoded time stamps in the header and I did not pursue the issue further because the reputable hpmuseum site was using TeleDisk to archive their old CP/M floppies, e.g. http://hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?sw=243 with a downloadable file in .td0 (=TeleDisk) format. Your guess about non-lossy file compressors may be the correct explanation of the different image files produced by TeleDisk, because TeleDisk can optionally create compressed floppy disk images. cabarc, pkzip, TeleDisk and nLite seem to have something in common: identical input produces different output. A subsequent step, however, can produce again identical repeatable output. In the case of nLite, two seemingly different slip-streamed CDs (created with identical input) should create two identical Windows installations ... or maybe not? It is probably easier to identify errors when identical input creates identical output. If identical input does not create identical output, eventually you get a pile of bugs, like Windows. And with every major new release, with new features, the number of bugs increases exponentially.

I use Win98 95% of my time, and WinXP maybe 5%. The main advantage of Win98 is its security from malware and government and industry spyware. I have been treading in dark waters, with a dedicated emule computer downloading under Win98 24 hrs/day, for the past 5 years. I only run on-demand scans, mainly of new downloads, encountering about 300-500 viruses, trojans etc per month. The last infection of my system was in January 2004, the last system-wide scan maybe a year ago.msfn.org has the best Win98 forum in the internet at http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=8 Here a "little" challenge: How about installing and creating a functioning Win98 on your current physical machine (i.e. not in a virtual machine)

Hi John, Thanks for your thoughts, but the CDs were burned under nLite with the lowest burning speed (8x) and with Verify selected, and I strongly doubt that it is a writing speed problem. Since the slip-streamed CDs displayed this "CD/DVD Read Error!" under Win98, but not under WinXP, I would speculate that the burning module of nLite burns a CD which is not quite compatible with Win98. UltraISO v9.3.3.2685 under Win98 could not create an ISO image of the CD produced by nLite [->Tools ->Make CD/DVD Image], but ->File ->Open CD/DVD worked Ok under Win98, without an error msg. Since UltraISO under Win98 displays the error msg "CD/DVD Read Error!" when 100% of the nLite CD has been read, it might be something in the trailer which UltraISO cannot swallow under Win98, maybe it has something do with a slightly different treatment of file names or codepages under Win98. Have you tried to create under Win98 an ISO image of an nLite CD? I would venture to say that the output of the burning module of nLite has not been fully tested under Win98. Does nLite actually run under Win98SE if .NET Framework 2.0 is installed?In any case, if it is confirmed, this is a really minor bug, and of interest probably only to the few remaining users of Win98. I was mainly interested in finding the reason for the different files, and dencorso has found the right explanation. The burning problem only led me to the puzzle of the different files.

Thanks dencorso. You solved the puzzle of the different files. When I extracted 6 of the different .CA_, .IN_, .SY and .TX_ files on 2 CDs, the resulting extracted files were identical.

I have created with Direct Burn+verify under nLite v1.4.9.1 a WinXP Home Edition SP3 installation CD which contains the AHCI driver. The CD worked fine installing WinXP SP3 on an Asus Eee 1000HE netbook. WinXP now runs fine on the 1000HE under both AHCI and IDE modes. After installing WinXP I wanted to archive this CD by creating an ISO image of it with UltraISO v9.3.3.2685 under Win98SE, which is my main operating system on my main computer. At 100% complete, the iso-creation failed with the error msg: "CD/DVD Read Error!". I therefore repeated the creation and burning of the slip-streamed CD with a different CD-burner, starting with a freshly copied directory containing the original and unmodified WinXP installation CD. Again I got this "CD/DVD Read Error!" when I tried to make an ISO image of the 2nd slip-streamed CD. Older UltraISO v7.6.5.1225 under WinXP, however, created an Ok iso file from the slip-streamed CDs, without this error msg. UltraISO v9.3.3.2685 has worked very reliably for me under Win98SE. I strongly suspect that nLite does NOT burn CDs correctly. I then repeated the creation of this slip-streamed CD, and selected in nLite "Create Image" instead of "Direct Burn". I subsequently burnt a CD with Nero from this .iso image, and Nero produced a good CD, of which UltraISO could in turn make a good .iso image. So Nero burnt a good CD, but not nLite. During that fiddling around I had actually created 4 slip-streamed CDs, which were supposedly identical. But when I compared the 6407 files on each CD with Beyond Compare/Hex Viewer, between 8 to 19 files on each CD were different, mainly just a few bytes, in IN_ and DL_ files. These were not bad burns because the files on the 4 CDs were identical to the files in the corresponding 4 working directories on the HDD used by nLite. In computing, identical input should produce identical repeatable output, or a red flag comes up. WinXP installed fine with the 1st CD, but I have 3 more CDs, all different. Which one is a good one, with no surprises down the road, or are they all bad? Which one shall I archive? Why do some files in the working directories differ, given identical input?

I just looked at the French and German web shops of Kaspersky, and they still sell v6 license keys, in contrast to the US web shop: http://www.kaspersky.com/de/license_renewal http://www.kaspersky.com/fr/license_renewal These license keys probably work only with the French or German versions 6, but this makes me speculate that Kaspersky Internet Security may remain updateable under Win98 until the end of 2010 at least.

There are still plenty of retail boxes of Kaspersky Internet Security 6 at ebay. Only the license key inside the retail box is of interest. The software to be installed should not be the stuff on the CD in the box, but v6.0.2.621 which updates Ok under Win98SE. Unfortunately, when one tries to download the previously downloadable v6.0.2.621 from http://usa.kaspersky.com/support/208279811...port/208279811/ only a msg: forbidden is displayed. In December 2008 I was informed that generally the not-yet-used licence keys DO expire after a certain point, since v6.0 hasn't been sold in stores for a while. I had nevertheless purchased at that time several retail boxes of v6, but my gut feeling is that pretty soon Kaspersky will also walk away from Win98. Kaspersky Internet Security v6 came on the market in 2006, so given the 3-year-warranty period required by law in Europe, one could speculate that their Win98 support is going to end in 2009. I am using Kaspersky only as an on-demand scanner, mainly for eMule downloads under Win98. When Kaspersky Internet Security does stop updating under Win98, I will have to do the on-demand scanning under WinXP. On-line scanning is not feasible, given the amount of downloads to be scanned.

Kasperky Internet Security v6.0.2.621 still updates fine under Win98, I just updated the signatures.During updating I recently got the msg "File black.lst is missing or corrupted. Please run Updater to fix the problem." and KIS stopped working. It was the 2nd time that I got this msg during the last 8 months, even if I am using a valid key from a purchased retail box. Somehow their blacklisting procedure is buggy. It's unlikely that it is a Win98-specific problem since there are many messages at forum.kaspersky.com about black.lst. The problem of the missing or corrupted file black.lst gets solved by -> Uninstall KIS -> Repair, this sets the signatures back, then -> run Updater again, KIS will be updated Ok.

2 programs I have used for archiving my old CP/M floppies, Uniform and 22Disk, together with a 20-year-old MicroSolutions UniDOS CP/M CoProcessor Card were just sold at ebay for $185. The price jumped from $81 to $185 in the last few seconds, by the bidding of 3 experienced bidders with over 600 feedbacks. Over 400 pageviews of the item, I have never seen a UniDOS CP/M CoProcessor Card offered at ebay before.

FileMerlin v8.0 can read/convert .docx files under Win98. Quick View Plus v10 can also view/print/convert .docx files under Windows 95/98, but the installation for Win9x is very sophisticated and enlightening. Instructions could be found on the mule.

Data recovery: "There is no floppy in the drive" I just recovered and archived a floppy which most copying/imaging programs couldn't handle: Windows Explorer: "The disk in A: is not formatted" WinImage: "There is no floppy in the drive" GRDuw: "Unrecognized Media" DCF: "Address Mark not found - track 0" SH-Copy Star: "Error while analyzing the disk" VGA-Copy: "Diskette nicht lesbar" [=Diskette not readable] DskImage could only produce a useless image file, with no files visible in it; it displayed "12 sectors were unrecoverable" (all on track 0) The solution was TeleDisk v2.23. I made a .td0 image of the floppy. When TeleDisk reported that sectors 1+2 of track 0 were bad, I just pressed Enter. Then I restored the .td0 image file to a preformatted floppy, and voilá, Windows Explorer displayed all the files of the bad floppy. The files had the same size and creation date as those on a similar original floppy, but many files had different content. ScanDisk gave the error message "This drive contains one or more backup copies of the file allocation table", I selected repair, and then the files were identical to the corresponding files on that similar original floppy. I could also create a readable copy from this bad original floppy with Anadisk v2.10 (May 1995), but after repairing the file system with ScanDisk, 1 resulting file was different from the other similar original floppy. So TeleDisk v2.23 (Sept.1996) seems to make more accurate copies/repairs than Anadisk, at least in this case.

Data recovery: Floppy with bad sectors in the data area (i.e. not on track 0) I have just finished recovering 2 bad floppies with an LS-120 floppy drive and DskImage in a Win98 DOS window.. One floppy eventually was read correctly after placing it in the freezer for about 5 minutes. The freezer really helped. The other bad 1.44MB floppy had initially 15 bad sectors in the data area. I had to create 33 floppy images with DskImage until I got 2 images where DskImage did not report any errors. After each image made I slapped the floppy about 10 times with full force against my thighs, and this treatment apparently caused DskImage to encounter fewer and fewer bad sectors. DSKIMAGE_RETRIES was set to the maximum of 10. After 10 images I put the floppy into the freezer for 10 minutes, this again reduced the number of bad sectors immediately. After another 10 more images I gave the floppy a break for 8 hours, then continued, a little break did help. DskImage is an unstoppable copier, in contrast to GRDuw, which fails/aborts frequently with the message: "unrecoverable disk error". The 2 image files with no bad sectors were amazingly a little different from each other on the last track, may be a bug in DskImage which reported "no sectors were unrecoverable" or because that last track was "empty", outside the data area. The 2 nearly-identical image files produced both good files. ScanDisk reported a damaged folder and found lost file fragments. The original floppy was a little damaged in the process, I had to remove the metall slider. Before the harsh treatment of the floppy xxcopy16 was able to file-copy many files Ok, with their original filenames and file dates. After the harsh treatment xxcopy didn't see 20% of the files anymore on the original floppy. In any case, the data on this bad floppy was completely recovered, and the lost fragments recovered by ScanDisk were identical (+ some junk at the end) to corresponding files obtained initially by xxcopy. I archived the files obtained with xxcopy because they had good file names and file dates.

Warning about files extracted with WinImage from floppy disk images When you have a floppy with file system errors (FAT copies are not the same, lost clusters, cross-linked files, etc) and make an image of it, the floppy disk image will also contain these file system errors. Some files extracted lateron with WinImage v8.1 from such a bad floppy disk image may be corrupt and differ from the files on the original floppy. The files copied from the original floppy with xxcopy and the /v2 parameter for byte-by-byte verification may differ from the files extracted by WinImage -> Image -> Extract. Sometimes WinImage flags during the extraction that a file is different from the original one with the error message "Error writing file xxx", but NOT always. If you are certain that the original floppy had no file system errors, then you are fine, the files extracted from the image are identical to the original files. If you did not check the original floppy with ScanDisk or NDD for file system errors prior to making the image, then you cannot be certain that the files extracted by WinImage v8.1 are identical to the original files. To identify floppy images with file system errors, one could extract the floppy image to a floppy, and then run ScanDisk on this floppy. ScanDisk can then usually repair the files, so that they will be identical to those file-copied with xxcopy. Whenever ScanDisk reports errors or GRDuw displays read error messages during the creation of an image file, I add BAD to the filename of the floppy image file, e.g. xxxxBAD.dcf so that I remember later that some files extracted from the image by WinImage may not be identical to the original files.

There are several other Slowdown-type utilities. There is a newer v1.03 of Slowdos. Older v1.02 was posted by Glenn9999 at posting #7. Slowdos is part of Flopper [= bootable-disk emulator], which seems to be quite interesting. I have not yet tried Slowdos, Throttle or Flopper, but eventually I may when I try to get Uniform v1.07 going on my dual-core desktop, hopefully in a Win98 DOS window. On my 12MHz Toshiba T3200 portable I can, with Uniform, access files under one drive letter as DOS and under another drive letter as CP/M, both in DOS commands and in applications. But Uniform may have a slowdown problem. On my old Toshiba T3200 under DOS 6.22, for example, I have an external 5.25" floppy drive attached, which is assigned by DOS the drive letter B:. With Uniform v1.07 I have defined this SAME physical floppy drive as CP/M, HP-125 format and Uniform has assigned the CP/M-drive letter D:, i.e. one physical floppy drive has 2 drive letters, one for handling DOS floppies, the other for handling CP/M floppies. Under DOS, when I read from or write to D:, Uniform converts transparently the data from/to the CP/M file system. With Spellbinder v5.4, for example, [=an old DOS word processor], I can read file B:xxx from a DOS floppy, make some changes to it, insert a CP/M floppy, and then save it as D:yyy. The file yyy will then be written on the CP/M floppy, with no file dates. The major benefit of the CP/M file system is that there are no file dates, i.e. nobody can tell when you were doing what with the floppy. Maybe I will eventually be able, with any application running in a Win98 DOS window, to read from and to write to real CP/M-formatted floppies...

The author of Slowdown, Bret Johnson, has a new home page http://bretjohnson.us/ He also posted there a new DOS USB driver a few days ago. There is no particular reason that I am using v1.01, it has just worked fine for me with VGA-Copy v5.3 during the past 9 years. I have dared to clean the external 360kB floppy drive of the Toshiba T3200, with pure isopropyl alcohol, and the drive is still alive. I bought about 5 years ago a supply of five 5.25" cleaning floppies and three 3.5" cleaning floppies.@jaclaz Thanks for the links about the Imation LS-120 Superdisk head cleaning kit, I've put it on my shopping list, whenever I find one reasonably priced. CopyStar v4.31b SH-CopyStar is a Win95 program which can format 360kB 3.5" floppies under Win98 and does not need Slowdown. The right "b" version can be downloaded here The "b" version has an uninstaller, while the version without the "b" doesn't, otherwise they are identical. CopyStar is only useful for creating special format floppies under Win98, without VGA-Copy+Slowdown. CopyStar is shareware which is not offered for sale anymore by the authors and is kind of abandoned. BTW, to format with CopyStar, you have to click in the Format window on "Format", not on "Ok"

I fully agree with CharlotteTheHarlot.I am using with my dual-core desktop under Win98 a ViewSonic 2030b monitor (1600x1200 resolution), which also has a USB 2.0 connector/hub, but I never use the USB 2.0 connector. This USB 2.0 connector was probably intended for a USB mouse or a USB keyboard, which I don't use because I have turned off in the BIOS "Legacy USB Support". USB devices therefore are not yet recognized by the computer at the time when the System Commander menu comes up with the operating system selection menu, i.e. before the USB driver or an operating system is actually loaded. I am using a serial, not a USB, mouse and keyboard, which work fine. And of course, wireless devices don't work at the time the operating system selection menu is displayed. On my older Dell Inspiron laptops I have installed nusb 3.3 and am using the Orangeware driver v2.4.1 for USB 2.0 hubs.

VGA-Copy VGA-Copy has become freeware, v6.25 can be downloaded from here, then -> VGA-Software, then -> vgacp625.zip I have been using v5.30, which works fine as a data recovery tool for bad floppies. v6.25, however, canNOT be recommended as a data recovery tool. When trying to copy the floppy with a bad track 0, v6.25 just gives me the message: "Diskette nicht lesbar" [=diskette not readable]. I don't know where one can get this old v5.30 now. I had bought the old retail v5.3 on a software CD called "VGA-Ware" about 15 years ago. I had rejected v6.02 and v6.21 and preferred v5.30. VGA-Copy is another good example that the last version of a piece of software is very often NOT the best version. Clearing the floppy drive There is one trick to running VGA-Copy v5.30: If it doesn't accept a floppy, just remove the floppy from the floppy drive and then click on Read (without the floppy inserted). This somehow clears the floppy controller, and VGA-Copy v5.30 then works fine. A similar clearing of the floppy controller is done automatically by TeleDisk and GRDuw after writing/formatting a floppy, with a loud disk-access noise for about 2 seconds. The floppy controller can also be somehow cleared by running Chkdsk in a Win98 DOS window, with no floppy inserted. I have on my Windows Desktop an MS-DOS shortcut to "E:\USWIN98\COMMAND\CHKDSK.EXE A:" for clearing the floppy drive. BTW, I am using VGA-Copy v5.30 on an old 750MHz Pentium 3 laptop with Slowdown v1.01 and the following command line: "D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /1600 VGACOPY.EXE" Setting the right Slowdown parameter (here "/1600") is a matter of trial and error. I have not yet used VGA-Copy v5.30 on my faster dual-core desktop and don't know whether it will run there with Slowdown. In any case, VGA-Copy does have problems working with modern fast CPUs and needs a Slowdown-type program. VGA-Copy v5.30 also works fine with Slowdown under Windows XP. VGA-Copy v5.30 can format under WinXP a 720kB 3.5" floppy disk to 360kB and 180kB (SS)