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BTW, 775MB?! Any idea why? Briefly reading the KB article, it doesn't seem to add anything useful.

I don't have specific OE recovery software suggestions. You can try looking at the inbox file with a hex editor. I'm not sure, but it may be plain text. Besides that, in the future, maybe try an email client that stores each email as a separate file. I wouldn't consider flash drives to be good for long term backup. If you want it to last for years, use optical media or a removable HDD. Another thing, why restart the whole backup? Just backup a directory at a time.

I don't find it trivial. Dead HDDs are my biggest worry in computers, and as I transition from optical-based storage to HDDs I'd like to maximize their chance of survival. Yes, you may have an HDD work fine after 10 years, but also one that dies after 6 months. There's correlation between uptime and failure rates: I would guess it has to do more with the mechanical parts rather than the electronics. And there's also noise. Why moved from the XP forum? My interest is specifically in XP. NT6 drivers, device manager, and software may behave differently.

The previous AV software I was okay with before Win8's Defender was McAfee's VirusScan 4. It worked liked I wanted: Scan on demand, background scanning that can be enabled/disabled completely and doesn't monitor anything but file access, manual updating. While I did try a few AV software after that, they were all increasingly too much of a hassle and I just switched to using VirusTotal.com on suspect files, and maybe some SandBoxie use. While it's a pity Defender doesn't have proper context menu integration, nor interesting stats while scanning, for most part I find its background scanning between harmless to bearable, with some exceptions. And it can be disabled (not completely straightforward but not too bad), or at least it seems that way. And then, there's the advantage of it being an integral part of Windows, so no compatibility problems expected.

Why did you use it to begin with? Windows Defender is just fine (if you don't mind the lack of context-menu-initiated scanning), and the least likely to cause trouble.

Maybe the "no restart", "no shutdown", "no settings" are features? I suggest: "Always on! Never worry about settings again!" Maybe this sheds some light: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/ Like a few annoying web design conventions of the recent years (and heavy AJAX everywhere), some random bad ideas start small then become fads. Try the SFC and DISM commands Noel suggested above. I ran into a very similar error code with an update a few months ago. Turned out to be some Start Menu directory missing. Apparently the Start Menu is considered now "system files" and Microsoft's stupid updates expect to find certain things there or else they fail with cryptic error codes.

I'm not after full power off, just spindown and device disable. I want to have this option for a mostly "offline" storage disk. I believe the HDD will last longer if not spinning, and it also reduces noise. By now I've tried without the Nvidia drivers. HotSwap! now does spin down, but after waking up the drive (using the software's "scan for hardware changes" option) it constantly spins it back down even after the volumes are mounted. Maybe I'm missing something. revoSleep is better, no spindowns after wakeup, and even hibernation when the HDD is spun down works without spinning it up first. But I still have to check more Windows start/stop scenarios. Assuming there are advantages to using the Nvidia drivers, it would still be nice to find a solution to the spinup problem when disabling the HDD manually from device manager.

How can one disable an HDD in Device Manager without the HDD spinning up first? I'm trying to have a way to disable/enable an HDD on demand. It's on an nForce 410 controller. HotSwap! and revoSleep don't work in different ways. There's no "Safely Remove" icon for the HDD. If I enable RAID in the BIOS, the partitions in the drive don't appear. What does work is unmounting the volumes with mountvol and spinning down the HDD with HDDScan. But the HDD is still visible to lower-level software, like HDTune, which spins it up. I thought I'd just disable the HDD from Device Manager, but it's spun up before being disabled. After it's disabled I can't spin it down.

Here you go. But I'm curious, why do you find it useful? I can understand people liking the thumbnails (looks nicer, nevermind functionality ), but the desktop item just gets in the way in the tabbing order, and there's already Win+D to get there immediately. AltTab_811_x64_no_thumbs_only.7z

Thanks. I'll check them out, though I already did web searching. In theory it should work, I think even without the DSCLIENT update (with NTLMv1 only, that is). What's a proper SMB server? Win98 uses the same SMB/CIFS protocol as newer Windows, just an older iteration of it, and going over NetBIOS(/NetBEUI/NBT = ports 137 to 139) rather than directly TCP/IP (port 445). If I got the mess right.

BTW, depending on what games you want to play, the ATI Rage chips aren't good for 3D. You may also want to have more than 256MB of RAM if you want to play year 2000+ games comfortably.

I already tried with LMCompatibility=3. "Simple Sharing" is disabled on the NTs. The shares are password protected. Shares without password work (from 98 to 8 not always, but haven't checked in depth yet, and anyway the intention is to have it passworded). The problem is with passworded. It doesn't work accessing from 98 to XP using NTLM, and ideally NTLMv2. From 98 to 8 even LM doesn't work, but there are still things a few things I should try before declaring it official. The other direction, to password protected shares on 98, works from XP (username greyed out and set to "Guest" in the password prompt), but not from Win8 which wants a username and not only password. Doesn't 98 support NTLM(v1) by default? (That's what's implied by various Microsoft articles.) What VXD/DLL(s) are responsible for NTLMv2 support? Just VREDIR.VXD? Is 128-bit encryption needed generally? (Though 98 does have the correct SECUR32.DLL.) Should I pay attention to NtlmMinClientSec / NtlmMinServerSec?

I'm trying to solve MS share problems (is there ever a time when there aren't such problems?) between 98SE to/from XP and 8, while using NTLM hashes, and ideally NTLMv2. The only way I can get 98 to talk with XP is to allow XP to store LM hashes. I thought 98 is supposed to support NTLM (v1) by default, but it doesn't appear so. I also tried installing the DSClient (and uninstalling because it adds delay during startup). Various VXDs and DLLs were updated, but still no go. I tried setting in the registry LMCompatibility to 3, to 0, and unset. The error messages when trying to access the NT shares may change, but the only way to get access is to enable LM hashes on the XP side. On 8, so far, I haven't managed to get access even with NoLMHash unset.

Is there any tool around specifically for the analysis/troubleshooting of NTLM/SMB? Wireshark is too generic, and I'd rather not delve much into network packets and where/how/what Windows stores for users/passwords.

Maybe it's a step in the right direction? What I want to see next: efficient core system snapshotting/backup, per-program sandboxing/virtualization with user control over where to store files/registry. Since there's already native VHD boot support, and some level of virtualization for legacy 32-bit or in the compatibility modes, it's halfway there. Now that I think of that, maybe I should check what Sandboxie's been up to.

It was a joke, see line 2.

But isn't that the best solution to OS problems? Recently, I was actually close to doing that for the first time ever (minus the format).

The window dressing/GUI is a large part of what the user perceives as "the OS", especially average users. It doesn't *have* to change, but there's a lot to improve, and there's no reason to stop at the XP standard. The question is where it should go. The answer is different for different people, so yes, hence the need for configurability or different shell options. Wasn't theming always a semi-hack because of the official need for signing? (I could be wrong, I never cared before Win8.) I don't know what's the idea behind forcing "a few moments ago" for date/times, but I think the solution is not to expect or demand this sort of control from Microsoft, but to move toward 3rd party shells where you'd have democratization and flexibility. What should be demanded from Microsoft is having a well-defined 3rd-party-shell API that would maintain good program/shell compatibility. BTW, I don't know how much stock you can put in what a Microsoft forum "Support Engineer" says. They never struck me as overly knowledgeable or useful. It's had a long life so far, and I don't think there's a large risk of OSX or Ubuntu taking over in the next 5 years.

I don't like a lot of parts of Windows, but I can say the same about most software. It doesn't say much. There are thousands of MS people developing core OS features, many of which visible/used by users or developers. All these "window dressings" are a part of what nowadays is expected to come with an OS, even if we find many of them to be useless and a lot of the rest annoying. One of the main problems, I still think, is that the shell in Windows is sort of "holy", with no real 3rd party alternatives. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because the stock is too ingrained, or not enough APIs exposed, or it's underdocumented. Or maybe it's just waiting for someone to do it. A popular 3rd party shell or two would both allow people be the masters of their GUI regardless of the specific whims of the OS version they use, and maybe let/drive Microsoft to focus more on core rather than GUI. That corporatespeak is not new. And it's the same with all big companies, or small ones wanting to appear big.

What do you mean with point 2?

I might try it in 2016.

There are links in the first post. Assuming you're on an updated version of Windows 8.1, you'll want the first link.

Thanks.

How did you create the differential VHDs? Are the non-leaf VHDs immutable? What did you use to link them to the boot loader/manager?

I'm not familiar with this. Are you switching sub-VHDs for different uses? How do you choose what set to use?