billyb

I've been casually glancing at this thread for a few years and have what is probably a dumb question- Is this sp3 project sort of a friendly competitor to the unofficial service pak I slapped onto my win98se machines a few years ago from Mpgx's site? His SP link there leads to and exhuberant sp2 page... which is where I updated from and have kept things for four years. Or is this project designed to go further forward from what I already have from mpgx? On casual reading, it seems to add much more I've thought about dowloading this project a few times, but it seems it's still in development. Not sure when the right time is to jump in to try this out. I'm not really techy to the point of wanting to mix and match features, but I do like the idea of these unofficial service paks. I have a few or Rloews patches too.

Trying to figure out if what I'm doing is headed for certain corruption of data. Four of my ancient Packard Bells have outlived all my other original dos/98 days computers. I get mixed information on how one of them can/can not support large drives over 137gb. I routinely pop large fat32 drives inside and the full drive amounts always display fine and "seem" to work fine. I have win98se 4.10.222 with a bunch of Soporific updates on this particular pentium 200 computer with 96mb of ram. Bought the machine new in 98 and use it for running old 98 and old dos programs. All seems to work fine. The very-old bios shows autoconfigure as well as other choices like "lba" . I leave it on autoconfigure. I have two drive bays in the machine and the 40gb system drive stays there most of the time. I have sometimes formatted a 160gb drive (fat32) with something like Western Digital's data lifeguard tools (while that drive was in the second bay of the win98 computer itself) and I'll get a pop up saying that an overlay is required (which the WD routine wants to slap on before formatting. As a test, I formatted the drive as fat32 160gb over on a Winxp machine (no overlay) and then put the 160gb drive into the old Packard Bell, restored a ghost image of win 98 there ... and all seems to work fine. The computer boots up, shows the full 160gb drive and no overlay prompts. When I work with programs on that drive, all seem to work okay during the tests. When I reboot into dos or do a fast switch into dos from win 98, programs there also seem to work fine. That right there throws me off. I thought Dos could never see huge drive amounts like I have in the machine. I formatted a 250gb drive as fat32 on a Winxp machine and then popped that into the old packard bell bay #2 and booted up. Win98se now boots up with everything on its 160gb C drive and also sees the full 250gb (well, more like 232gb) on thd second drive for data storage. I also bought a couple of Loew's apps including the large drive patch. He included a tester program called 48bitlba. When I run his test program in dos (with a 40gb system drive and a 250gb storage drive popped inside), the loew program shows... drive 1: 8.4gb= 16450560 Sectors.. not 48-bit disk dirve 2 8.4gb= 16450560 Sectors..not 48-bit disk Basically, I'm not sure how to intrepret that. Or the fact that I've been using these large drives without overlays. Loews notes seem to show that the bios doesn't support drives over 137gb. But I do pop in drives that large and larger inside and all seem to work. Am I cruising with hard drive time bombs here that may simpy abruptly corrupt data and crash? It seems from the data I have, that these large drives shouldn't be working at all. But they do. Anyone have info on how I should intrepret what I'm working with?

Well, that was fun. I've spent the past week trying every which way to get this system to see more than 1gb. All the suggestions work except when I implement one, I'd get the system seeing 2gb but my ATI card drivers went screwy, knocking me back to showing 640/standard vga and I lost half the intel drivers with Control Panel showed only 7 or 8 items in there total. Weird. On reboot, I could reinstall all the 848 intel stuff and ati drivers, Control Panel items looked great with eventually only 1 error msg on ACPI something or other resource error...but then I'd be back at the system only seeing 1gb. I went through a few complete reinstalls quite a few times, trying to nail this down. I also had a sidetrip in trying to get some usb devices to work which took some time too. Long about 3 days ago, I decided that even if I can only see 1gb in this machine, that's okay. I couldn't install win98 at all before the loew patch so I'm ahead at this point. I left it at that and continued on, added the autopatchers from 2007, 2008, some of those Revolutions effects and and a bunch of apps I have and .... cool .... Win98 now looks and works pretty snazzy compared to the old days when I last used it. I then turned to a P4 I have here that has 2.5gb in it. That one is based on 915gv chipset and gma900 integrated graphics. The loew patch works during initial install and the system sees all 2.5gb. Couldn't get any of the drivers to work as they're all xp. Looked all over at Intel and nothing. Dove into the posts around here a little deeper and realized I'm probably not going to get anywhere further with this particular machine. I might dig back into this experimenting later on with a few other P4s I have around, but at least for now, I at least have one working pretty well. Thanks Dencorso and you too Loew

Thx for all the tips on this. From your step 2 in the windows\system dir, I renamed vmm32.vxd to vmm32.rrd but loew patch attempt then shows "vmm32.vxd missing" and then halts. If I reboot instead, I have "Vmm32.vxd is required to run windows" and boot stops. If I rename the file back to vmm32.vxd, system boots fine. Just out of curiosity, the Rloew instructions have me typing "wininit" each time before I start the patch from the command prompt. What does wininit do?

I've been reading the links and have done a fresh install of win 98se a few times along with the loew patch and the system initially sees the entire 2gb of ram I have inside. I then install this and the system only sees 1gb from then on - http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html Any idea what it is in those fixes that un-does the Loew patch? Or at least what is knocking down the amount seen to 1gb. I've been reading the various posts and haven't nailed this down yet. The first workaround I tried was to reinstall the loew patch after the Exhberant update and I got a message "VMM file updated by other program". So I followed Rudolph's steps for replacing files in the windows system dir and then re-running the patchmem program. The patch showed successfully installing all files extracted and installed but at reboot, the system still only sees 1gb. Runs great. But only sees 1gb. Think I'll re-read the patch information and try a couple more fresh installs

Thanks for the links. I think I get the concept now. Win98 just isn't going to really need or address more than 1gb, but at least the patch lets me get it installed onto a 2gb P4 machine that otherwise wouldn't let me install at all.

I started in the dos days although am not as technical as a lot of you guys here. I installed the unofficial updates etc from here on an old 1999 pentium win98se machine last year and all is cool with that one. So now, I'm experimenting with installing win98se on faster P4s etc, some of which have 2-4gb of ram. I bought and installed Loew's patch a few days ago for a clean test install of win98se on a 2gb p4 HP a475 that I have sitting around. The pc is 4 or 5 or so years old and runs fine with xp. It's based on some sort of Asus mobo with intel 848 chipset etc. It also has both ide and sata ports on the mobo Loew has great documentation and the patch installed just fine after the first reboot. In fact, before I bought the patch and the large drive patch, I called him with some questions and he was very helpful. Haven't tried the large drive patch yet and am testing all this on an 80gb ide drive Anyway, I installed win98se and the Loew memory patch and then installed various video card drivers, intel chipset drivers etc and the unofficial update (2.1 is the one I have from about a year ago I believe). I also have another hofixes update something-or-other that I haven't installed yet from last year. On this 2gb P4, I have some intel smbus and other errors I'm still tracking down, but other than that, the pc seems to be flying just fine. One thing I haven't yet figured out is that the system icon on control panel shows I'm running 1024mb of ram although there is 2gb inside. The bios reports all the ram. Icon also shows I have Winse98 4.10.2222 A Any ideas on settings or things to search out on getting windows to see all of the 2gb?

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,...escription.html I've been holding off on installing win98se on some of the more powerful machines here (for use with some older programs I like that won't work at all with xp) because they all have 2gb-4gb of ram I've been seeing this ad in a few places the past few days and can't figure out if it's a scam or if this is what I need