Prozactive

Ah. You have to use a hex editor to determine the file version as it's not shown in File Properties. Actually, my version of Ghost 2003 is build .793 and yes, I had to run LiveUpdate several times to update it to that build. There were some tricks involved too like manually typing in server names or something like that.. I can't remember the details now. I thought it only updated the Ghost executable but perhaps it also updated the Iomega USB drivers. My version of ASPIEHCI.SYS has a file date of 28-May-2003. That's good to know that option (iv) works.. thanks! I've created a custom CONFIG.SYS file with multiple menu items for the various driver combinations and I'd like to edit it to add the additional options but I'm not sure if there's a limit for the number of menu items. I'll have to do some research into that. I'm glad to have helped in a minor way with version 2.27 of the Panasonic USB driver. I did wonder whether it was newer than the MDGx modified version. In my experience so far, the Iomega USB drivers are considerably faster for USB 1.1 than the Panasonic drivers. I'm not sure about USB 2.0 yet since I haven't had it until just recently. The Panasonic drivers do have a much wider hardware compatibility though. The Iomega drivers don't seem to detect many USB devices for some reason. I'll be curious if the new driver combinations will increase their hardware compatibility. Have you run into the "divide overflow" error cited earlier? The only time I've encountered that was trying to access a 1.0 TB external HDD. Every driver gave that error except ASPIDISK.SYS as I recall. I think you said you've successfully accessed a 1.5 TB external HDD?

1. KernelEx extensions are disabled for Browseui.dll. Interesting, as I don't recall doing that manually. Now that I think of it, I should point out that I was using the KB982381 Win2000 IE 6.0 SP1 security update version of Browseui.dll at the time (6.00.2800.2006). I don't know if that makes a difference. 2. The default action for Browseui.dll is "Allow injection". And explorer.exe is not checked as a source. I'm not sure I fully understand your last question. By "menu on Explorer", do you mean the Start menu? It was several months ago when all this occurred and my memory is a little fuzzy. But as I recall, I was not able to access the Start menu at all immediately after installing SSM, getting the errors I referenced earlier. And since I knew I just installed SSM, it had to be the cause of the errors. So I immediately disabled KernelEx extensions for all SSM files to see if that fixed the problem, which it did. Thanks again for your time and effort looking into this issue. You are definitely the resident SSM expert and I appreciated the long technical discussions about it and other security measures in that "no antivirus software" thread.

@dencorso: Some quick replies off the top of my head. - I didn't know option (iii), using DI1000DD.SYS with the Ghost Iomega USB drivers, would work. I'll have to try that and see how it works. Ditto with using GUEST.EXE with the Panasonic USB drivers. - I don't know my version of GUEST.EXE. It's the one that came with Ghost 2003 (file date 14-Aug-2002). - I'm using both the MDGx modified version 2.28 and the original 2.27 version of Panasonic USB drivers. - NJ32DISK.SYS was recommended several times somewhere but so far it hasn't proven very useful at all and it does appear to closely resemble DI1000DD.SYS. - Yes, ASPIDISK.SYS came from Adaptec but I can't recall the version. I believe it was 4.01. I did so many searches and downloads it's all a muddled chaotic blur in my mind. :/ My limited experience with it so far is that it was the only driver that allowed access to a friend's 1TB external HDD. I don't have any HDDs anywhere near that size. - And YES, the entire DOS USB access is certainly one big trial and error process!

Thanks for looking into this. I am indeed running SSM 2.0.8.583 and just verified it. The referenced error occurred several times shortly after loading SSM for the first time and happened as I clicked the Start button. The error always was: EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module <unknown> at 0000:9eff049c. with somewhat varying registers and stack dump data. It has not occurred again since I disabled all KernelEx extensions for SSM. EDIT: Yes, I installed SSM after KernelEx 4.5 RC 1. I didn't see your earlier post until now.

A "divide overflow" error is usually caused by a HDD that is too large for the driver(s), usually DI1000DD.SYS. I've experienced it when using a 1TB external HDD. As I recall, ASPIDISK.SYS was able to handle the drive but not DI1000DD.SYS or NJ32DISK.SYS. dencorso gives excellent information. I spent a great deal of time earlier this year developing a Ghost boot disk for USB devices and I did much of what he cited. I didn't realize that GUEST.EXE and DI1000DD.SYS could be interchangeably used with Iomega and Panasonic USB drivers though. I may have to try playing around with that.

@dencorso: Thanks for the info and advice. I do have NUSB 3.3 installed on my system. And I was just browsing that Ext. HDDs >137GB thread you referenced as well as the USB 2.0 stack thread, now that I actually have USB 2.0 hardware capability. I did some more troubleshooting work on the system yesterday and was finally somehow able to get Ghost to detect my external HDD. I'm still not sure how I managed to do so. More detailed trial and error troubleshooting will be required to figure that out. But all the files on the HDD check out 100% and I'm getting full USB 2.0 speed. The WinME Scandisk errors are what concern me the most, but they probably belong in that Ext. HDDs >137GB thread. Sorry to semi-hijack this thread. @herbalist: Coincidentally I just mentioned you in reference to SSM and KernelEx. I've started using SSM on my systems recently after reading your excellent detailed technical discussions and recommendations on it. But back to this topic, that's good you addressed the OP's specific issue. I almost got the NEC chipset add-on card but the VIA card was cheaper and I've always had good luck with VIA. As I recall, the NEC card was also supposed to work in Win9x/ME. I've seen the OrangeWare drivers frequently mentioned but I'm not familiar with them.

Coincidentally I just installed a Syba VIA VT6212 USB 2.0 PCI card and I'm in the process of testing it out. I was able to get the card to work after installing the official drivers from the VIA website but I'm having some strange issues I'm only starting to sort out and troubleshoot. The card was able to detect and access one of my external USB 2.0 HDDs but I encountered several serious errors after running WinME replacement Scandisk on the drive from Win98 SE. Strangely, the drive passes all WinXP Scandisk checks (it's a dual-boot system). I don't know what's going on here but it's very disturbing. And I can't detect the external HDD with my Ghost USB boot disk which has had no problems detecting and accessing every other external USB device to date.

I wanted to report a probable problem/bug in Revolutions Pack. I'm currently running RP 9.7.0 on my old Win98 SE Toshiba laptop and the system is extremely stable. However, yesterday I suddenly started experiencing multiple spontaneous BSoDs immediately after a single beep from the system. These BSoDs would occur at random times not associated with any particular action or software (one BSOD occurred with the system totally inactive) and they were all exactly the same: Fatal exception 0D at 052C:00000218 The only system change I made shortly before these BSoDs was to change the display resolution from 16 bit (High Color) to 32 bit (True Color). I had set the default resolution to 32 bit a long time ago and was surprised to see that it had somehow changed to 16 bit. These BSoDs rendered the system almost useless. After running a battery of hardware tests on the system RAM, CPU, and HDD (all of which passed with flying colors), I changed the display resolution back to 16 bit and so far the system has been stable again with no BSoDs. *knock on wood* I strongly suspect there is some issue associated with RP 9.7.0 and the display resolutions. Does RP 9.7.0 have to run only in 16 bit mode? I also got these BSoDs in 24 bit display resolution while trying to troubleshoot the problem. Thanks for any info or advice. BTW, my laptop display adapter is ATI Rage Mobility AGP.

I can confirm problems with KernelEx and SSM Free 2.0.8.583. I installed SSM several months ago and immediately started having various crashes and errors. I'm pretty sure they were associated with Explorer but I'll check my logs later to see. I was able to stop the errors by disabling KernelEx extensions for all SSM exe and dll files. I was running KernelEx RC 1 at the time. I meant to report the problem in this thread or herbalist's SSM thread but failed to do so. This post reminded me of the problem. Hm, I have AVZ installed but have not run it after installing KernelEx. I may have to try running it to see if I have the same problem. EDIT: This is the error I repeatedly got after installing SSM with KernelEx RC 1. EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module <unknown> at 0000:9eff049c. Registers: EAX=fffccead CS=0177 EIP=9eff049c EFLGS=00010246 EBX=00000000 SS=017f ESP=00d4f7ec EBP=00d4f844 ECX=00430b94 DS=017f ESI=00430b94 FS=227f EDX=00d4f850 ES=017f EDI=00000000 GS=0000 Bytes at CS:EIP: Stack dump: 71567288 00000003 71567093 71500000 fffccead 70aa03cb 00430b94 00430adc 71567334 00000001 00000000 00430adc 00000000 7156c82b 00430adc 00000000

Thank you as always for your excellent work and fast response, MDGx! The updated fix appears to install and work fine. I did previously manually update WMP.DLL to 9.00.00.4508 to implement KB979402. I also wasn't familiar with the term "SED file" but a brief Google search corrected that.

Thanks MDGx. I just tried loading the WMP 9 Q2378111 (MS10-082) WMP.DLL Fix (M2378111.exe) but got an error message saying wrong version of Windows Media Player. I definitely have WMP 9 installed. Is there some problem with the update? I'm going to try loading it on another system later to see if it also recurs.

Thanks egrabrych. I did not see that particular article but one of the steps I did try was to reassociate the Recycle Bin full and empty icons without any success.

Thanks Tihiy for your excellent work and continued development of Revolutions Pack. It has been working very well on my Win98 SE systems with one persistent annoying bug starting with my initial installation of Revolutions Pack 9.6.5 and continuing in every updated version since. For some reason, the Recycle Bin icon no longer accurately shows its status (empty or full) especially within Windows Explorer. The Recycle Bin icon on the desktop seems to behave more normally most of the time (vs. the Windows Explorer Recycle Bin icon) but I don't think it's 100% accurate either. The Windows Explorer Recycle Bin icon is almost 100% inaccurate after the first filling/emptying of the Recycle Bin (i.e., shows it as empty when it is full and vice versa). I've Googled this problem and tried a host of possible solutions without any luck. It's not a showstopper but it is quite annoying, and it became immediately obvious after my initial installation of RP 9.6.5. Any help or possible solutions would be greatly appreciated!

@Multibooter: Thanks for the long technical explanation. I did not realize you had BIOS HD geometry issues. I've had very limited experience with those but they are obviously very complex and can cause many serious problems especially with defragmentation and similar operations. Yes I knew about the APPLOG impact on Windows defragmentation and I have played around some with the native Win98 (actually WinME replacement) vs. WinXP defragmenters. The WinXP defrag does work somewhat differently from the Win98/ME defrag but not as much as I would've thought. I would classify it as a minor difference. I have not taken the time and energy to analyze the detailed file relocation differences though. I also appreciated the long earlier detailed discussions on the various disk defragmenters. My all-time favorite defragmenter is still Norton Speed Disk. I've used it ever since the DOS days before Peter Norton sold out to Symantec. The current version I'm using dates from around 1999 to 2000 (pre-WinXP) and it has problems with very large HD partitions, where it completely freezes during scanning. As a result, I have to use the WinXP defragmenter on those drives. I was not aware that the Speed Disk in NSW 2005 was the last version compatible with Win9x/ME and worked so well. If I had known, I definitely would've gotten it. I'll definitely keep my eye out for any old copies. I especially like the customizable defrag available in Speed Disk, where you can specifically arrange the order and locations of various files/directories based upon usage patterns.

Yeah that's it... from MDIE6CU34E or earlier. Thanks again for letting us know about WildBill's work. I'm thinking about trying to implement some of the other updates too. And I admit I don't really understand the QFE/GDR branch issue you mentioned. I'll have to do some research and reading up on it b/c I've seen those terms around before.

I wanted to chime in and confirm that the KB2360131 updated system files seem to be working fine in Win98 SE, at least so far. Thank you WildBill for your excellent hard work in creating these Win2000 updates! And thanks dencorso for informing us about them and Dave-H for being the first guinea pig. BTW, I also have the 6.00.2800.1501 version of MSHTMLED.DLL even though I don't remember installing the referenced Hotfix.

FYI, here are the DOS file compare check results of the registry changes made by the latest 28 Oct 2010 root certificates update (thanks MDGx!). rootsupd_102810.7z

Good points, jaclaz. It just seemed like using the native WinXP tools was the simplest and easiest solution.

Resurrecting this older thread. I finally got around to installing and playing around with the referenced software (WSC Guard and wpa_supplicant) but unfortunately could not get either to work in Win98 SE. Has anyone successfully done so? billtodd indicates that he was able to run wpa_supplicant but I wonder whether that was in WinXP. I get the following error in Win98 SE with wpa_supplicant 0.7.3 for Windows: wpa_gui error OpenService failed. [120] This function is only valid in Win32 mode. This appears to indicate that the program is not compatible with Win9x/ME. Their website does not explicitly state that it's incompatible with Win9x/ME but does say that it was mostly tested in WinXP SP2. On the other hand, WSC Guard seemed to install fine (via McAfee Wireless Security 4.1) but was unable to detect my wireless network card, giving some error message about incompatible network adapters. References: wpa_supplicant

I second dencorso. The simplest solution is to use the native WinXP disk defragmenter for all your partitions/drives. That's often what I do with my dual-boot systems. Is there any particular reason you need to do it from Win98?

@M()zart: I tried running HWMonitor 1.16 and verified that it gives the following error: The HWMONITOR.EXE file is linked to missing export SETUPAPI.DLL:CM_Get_DevNode_Registry_PropertyA. Interestingly, HWMonitor Pro 1.10 (for Win98) loads without error. As you stated, this is probably some sloppy coding on their part. Did you notify them about the error?

I had such problems with login to this forum even before - with Opera 10.0. This is the only reason why I still keep my Firefox 2 on Win 98 PC together with Opera even though my lack of HDD space. Opera 10.x (currently running 10.63) is fast and works well in Win98 but it is very flaky and quirky with saved passwords/log-in data. Luckily it's not a showstopper but it is annoying. Examples: * Continues to ask for new log-in/password for some websites even after saving log-in data multiple times for those sites. * Does not display dialog for saving log-in/password for some websites.

Thanks for the advice. I tried it with several screenshot examples and apparently ClearType is not enabled, as indicated by the unchecked checkbox in RP config. I'm not sure what is required to enable it.. perhaps there's some prerequisite that I'm missing.

Thanks for resurrecting this old thread. I've found that the ClearType checkbox in Revolutions Pack does not stay checked for some reason (several versions), and consequently I'm not sure if ClearType is enabled. Nothing is obvious visually.. is there anything specific I should look for?

I didn't realize the "Msimg32.dll is missing or too old" error was caused by KernelEx (I have it disabled for all Opera .exe and .dll files after experiencing numerous crashes in earlier versions). I thought it was a bug in the Opera 10.62 update and notified them of it since it was the first time it recurred in all of the updates since version 9.64. I also found moving Msimg32.dll from the main Opera installation directory to \Windows\System solves the error. I guess I'll have to move it back if I install RC4. Thanks for your great work!