jds

Yes, I believe that should be possible (haven't done it myself, so I can't give you details). BTW, assuming your modem is UMTS/WCDMA and based on Qualcomm, AFAIK, there are no W9X drivers available. There may be W9X drivers for Qualcomm CDMA chipsets, but adapting these to the UMTS/WCDMA chipsets is probably not feasible. Joe.

Neato! If you manage to succeed with "Create 9x sections from 2k/XP if missing" (from your To Do list), that will be like magic! (Of course, compatibility of binaries could then be a headache.) Joe.

Since this is a combined CD and DVD drive, I'm guessing one drive letter is for CD, the other for DVD. Joe.

Sad. You might try contacting the company to see if they can resolve the problem. You might also try the "divide and conquer" technique with your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to see if you have any conflicts. Also, did you check your PCMCIA/CardBus devices and their respective software to see if they provided DOS drivers? Joe.

Referring to the Novell WordPerfect Lawsuit?Hardly a reason to "eliminate" files. The same thing happened to Windows NT and all Dos and DOS-based Win3x and below - all gone! Technology moves on (want a free IBM 5150?) NO and I your lack of knowledge it is not good reason to be sarcastic ? I think about Java Lawsuit which is clearly speaking about end support for Win 98/ME. No. I think it was the nouveau Digital Research (post Novell) and their lawsuit over the origins of MS-DOS, which also included a demonstration of the W95 GUI running on top of DR-DOS (just like with W3.XX), which shattered any illusion (that MS tried to create) that W95 was an operating system independent of MS-DOS. When MS previously lost a court case involving licence fees demanded of MB manufacturers for MS-DOS, they dropped MS-DOS and pretended that W95 was something else and instead charged licence fees for that. This background and the whole "origins of MS-DOS" thing with DR is what prompted MS to go one step further, and phase out the W9X family in favour of the NT family (whereas they had previously said W9X was ideal for consumer use, and that NT was only intended for business & server applications). Also as I recall, there were aspects of the settlement with DR that remained secret, which (I speculate) may have directly or indirectly "forced" MS to move away from its MS-DOS code base. Disclaimer - the above is based on my memory of events at the time and may have been subject to bit-rot. Joe.

Thanks, Den!!! Joe.

Yes, that's the best theory so far! Joe.

Hmmm ... Any idea how to update to version 8.3.0.1335? I've gone through Live Update (two or three iterations were required) and this brought Ghost 8.3 to version 8.3.0.1331 only. @Prozactive : According to some comments on the web, "cdrlib" = CD Rom Library (settings for various CD ROM drives). Joe.

This seems strange. I'm pretty sure I've done this (with my version of phelum's patches) without any dramas. Did you immediately reboot after changing 'IO.SYS' (just in case some copy of 'IO.SYS' in memory gets reloaded and then code addresses have changed, or some such confusion)? Given a partition that has just been formatted, if you just copy IO.SYS alone to it, using DOS, it'll be copied as a single continuous image, starting at cluster 2 (the first cluster). Now, to put in a continuous image of any file, starting at an arbitrary cluster number, especially when the partition in not empty anymore, that requires a lot more calisthenics and patience, but can be acomplished by hand, with a good hexeditor/sector-copier, by anyone who has a really strong reason to do it (like learning how-to, for instance). Well, according to Mr Loew, only the first 2K of 'IO.SYS' needs to be contiguous, so the problem shouldn't normally arise for FAT16 partitions of 64M (or greater) or FAT32 partitions of 128M (or greater), see : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365 Joe. PS. Earlier O/S seemed to start using 2K cluster size with smaller partitions : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/67321

I'm pretty sure my Xircom modem and LAN adaptors came with drivers for DOS. Check them and other similar OEM's for possible drivers. I think Digital Research had a driver suite, but that was long ago, so it would be outdated anyway.. Currently, at least one company has some commercial DOS offerings : http://www.tssc.de/products/cardware/cwdw/default.htm http://www.tssc.de/products/enablers HTH Joe.

I'm not using the original Mircrosoft version. The one included in the SP3, I patched with all of the combinations below Thanks to all of you. http://home.exetel.com.au/phelum/w98.htm http://www.geocities.ws/j_ds_au/general.html OK, as long as you've done this in the sequence indicated above. One of Steven/phelum's patches can cause problems, but my version of his patches will correct (reverse) this. Joe.

OK, here's how to get the fully patched IO.SYS : 1. Start with the KB311561 (2001/12/1) version of IO.SYS. 2. Apply my version of Steven Saunderson's IO.SYS patches : http://www.geocities.ws/j_ds_au/general.html 3. Apply rloew's IO.SYS patch : It's fairly straightforward, however, let me know if you need the actual patched file and I'll upload it somewhere. Joe.

Thanks for your efforts, PROBLEMCHYLD, great work! Hmmm ... that's a problem. Please see : Also, the KB311561 update of 'IO.SYS' should be optional. Some of us have patched versions to fix some nasty bugs in the official MS version. Joe.

No particular reason. Originally I didn't know about it, now I simply haven't been sufficiently motivated. Glad to hear it. BTW, I forgot to mention I use drive E: for CMD.EXE, so for most people, they need to edit the REG file example and change "e:" to "c:". Joe.

What about Java (not to be confused with JavaScript)? Joe.

Hey, I had that happen with one (perhaps two) apps some months ago. Don't remember the details or whether I mentioned about this somewhere. I'll try to remember the details, especially the fix, and add these here if I manage it. Edit : Ah yes, here it is : Joe.

Yep, and according to me too! : However, it's a huge (cumbersome) PITA. And soooo slow, particularly as the flash fills up. Joe.

Great! If so, please make the IO.SYS update optional, as the last MS version still has nasty bugs. Joe.

Well, that is indeed a viable work-around, however, I wonder how many insertion/removal cycles before the card connector of the camera becomes unreliable? Joe.

Because MS (and Apple are even worse) don't like you having such flexibility (too dangerous, users must be protected from themselves, blah blah), so now more and more cameras are using MTP/PTP instead. Also, see for details on two more cameras. Joe.

Fujifilm digital camera A170, but not with the supplied version of FinePix software, you need to find an earlier version such as 5.3.10E (eg. for S6500fd) for W98-compatibity (the supplied USB driver is OK, but seems useless without that cumbersome software). Note, these cameras use the PTP/MTP interface, not mass storage, so you're basically forced to use their drivers and software. Panasonic Lumix digital camera DMC-LS80. (Uses mass storage interface, so standard file access works fine.) Joe. [Edit: Corrected some details about the A170 driver.]

Another alternative CMD.EXE can be found in ReactOS, version 0.3.1 (or earlier, for W9X compatibility). Neither version supports the "for /f" option. Otherwise, quite handy. BTW, for the MS (WIN95CMD.EXE) version : 1) Caps Lock is treated as a Shift Lock (bug). 2) This is what I use for the Pipe Work-around (based on Charles Dye) : REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor] "AutoRun"="set comspec=e:\\windows\\cmd.exe" "CompletionChar"=dword:00000009 Joe.

Some months ago, I tried to do exactly the same thing, the only difference, the laptop ran Vista. MS have clearly made an effort in Vista, and presumably 7, to be as incompatible as possible with everything else, including previous versions of MSW. I can't remember exactly what I tried, but in the end, I ran an small FTP server application on the W98 machine and connected to this on the laptop. From memory, you can get Explorer on Vista to treat an FTP site as if it were a network drive. It's a kludge, but it was all I could do without going insane. HTH, Joe.

I agree entirely. Actually, I'd forgotten about that XP stuff, since I've never used it. I had noticed that other commercial applications were being culled in the newer releases, presumably due to complaints by their respective copyright holders. It's a shame about these copyright issues and hopefully these will be fully addressed in future releases, because there are a lot of other useful DOS utilities and drivers there, that are very difficult to find. Joe. PS. Maybe the solution for the XP issue would be to do something along the lines of BartPE ... ?

Well, pre-7.10 MS-DOS will not recognize/support FAT32 and pre-7.00 MS-DOS will not recognize/support LBA, so that limits you to using only the first 7.8G of any hard drive, and FAT16 partitions (of 2G maximum). In addition, MS-DOS 3.3 will be missing a number of Int21-6C functions, which can cause problems with some modern applications, although you can get partial support in my 'util2.zip' bundle : http://www.geocities.ws/j_ds_au/general.html As for NTFS, if missing Int21 functions don't prevent their use, there have been a number of drivers for DOS to give read or read/write support - but use with care! One place you can get a sample boot CD which includes various NTFS drivers is Hiren's Boot CD (search the web). The earlier editions were a bit notorious due to copyright infringement issues, but more recent editions have largely culled such works. Ah, the infamous RTE 200 bug! No worries, I have packaged the two best/safest solutions for this issue (one is best suited when you have source, the other when you don't) here : http://www.geocities.ws/j_ds_au/pascal.html Joe.