LoneCrusader

Well, here goes for my first post in the XP forum, heh Ok... I am setting up a custom built system for a friend of mine, and I am having a very strange error when attempting to create a disk image. I have set up several systems like this one before, and never had this problem. The system is multi-boot, Windows 98SE, Windows XP Pro, and OpenSUSE 11, managed by VCom System Commander. There are two hard drives, configured like this: Disk 1 Partition 1 - FAT32 - Windows 98SE (System Commander installed to this partition) Disk 1 Partition 2 - FAT32 - Windows XP Pro Disk 1 Partition 3 - EXT3 - OpenSUSE 11 Disk 2 Partition 1 - FAT32 - Windows 98SE Storage (Drive D) Disk 2 Partition 2 - FAT32 - Windows XP Pro Storage (Drive D) Disk 2 Partition 3 - FAT32 - Shared between all 3 operating systems All partitions were created and formatted with System Commander. All systems are independent of and hidden from one another. (XP does not know 98 exists) I have spent many hours getting all of this set up, installing drivers, software, etc etc, and now I am attempting to create disk images of these systems for backup, using DriveImage for the Windows partitions and PartImage for the Linux system. All systems are up and running fine, and I have had no problems whatsoever booting any of the three, until I try to create an image of the XP partition. DriveImage creates an image of the Windows 98 partition without problems, but whenever I try to create an image of the XP partition, I get an error saying that the boot sector contains incorrect data (Dont remember the exact wording of that error). Then, when I exit DriveImage, the ENTIRE partition table for BOTH hard drives completely disappears. Both drives have no partitions defined at all. When this happened the first time, I thought all of my work was down the drain, but I used TestDisk to check the drives, and managed to recover all of the partitions. TestDisk found corrupted boot sectors on the XP system partition (Disk 1 Part 2) and the XP storage partition (Disk 2 Part 2), but I was able to use the backup boot sector for each and rewrite the partition table on both drives. Upon restart, Windows 98 booted normally, and I was able to reinitialize System Commander. But when I tried to boot Windows XP, it gave an error saying "select proper boot device" (exact wording??). So I used the Recovery Console "fixboot" to write a new boot sector for the XP partition, and then everything went back to normal. I was able to boot and use all 3 systems. So I tried creating an image of the XP partition with DriveImage again... and the exact same thing happened a second time. The partition table of both drives completely disappeared. So I went in with TestDisk again, exact same process as before, and recovered everything. Had to rewrite the XP partition boot sector again, and now everything is back up and working. Is there some way I can fix whatever is wrong with the XP partition? The OS boots and operates fine, but whenever I try to make a backup image, DriveImage claims there is incorrect data in the boot sector of that partition, even though the system exhibits no problems and I have rewritten a new boot sector to it twice from the Recovery Console. I really don't want to have to spend hours setting all this up again.. any ideas?

Well I suppose it's time to get back to the problem at hand, because now it's more complicated. A few minutes ago, I copied all of the data (excluding one folder) from my flash drive to a Windows XP machine so I could burn it to a CD or put it back on the drive once this problem is fixed. The folder I excluded contained a small handful of files from an openSUSE 11 Linux installation. There were a couple of graphics, about 3 screenshots, one text document, a backup of bookmarks.html from Firefox, and about six configuration files (customizing KDE, auto login, etc). I planned to copy these files to a temporary folder on a linux machine and then put them back on the drive when fixed. Now all but two of the files on the flash drive have disappeared. I did not even access this folder when I was copying the others to XP, so I know I did not accidentally delete them. Is there a way to recover them? And whether there is or not, this drive is destined for a repartition and reformat!

Well it doesn't look too promising, does it? Is it possible a later version of these functions could be implemented with KernelEx or a similar compatiblity-layer type application, thereby bypassing the need to patch a bunch of different software? Just trying to think logically, I have no coding or programming experience, so if I say something stupid please bear with me.

Hello BeatZero, always glad to see new members in the Windows 98 community. I've not had an opportunity to look at your project yet, but I find it very interesting, and I hope you get it perfected. I actually did some reading up on Windows 98 Live CD's a few weeks ago, but I haven't had the time to even attempt it yet and I have no experience with such things. Here's a link to a couple of the pages I looked at, you may have already seen them or they may not help you, but they're relevant to the topic at hand so they may help someone else. Win98LiveCD1 [link removed] I was thinking about trying my hand at making my own Win98 Live DVD. I know someone's going to ask "why DVD" so I'll go ahead and explain. The size of the image/install doesn't matter to me, in fact, I'd rather have the entire system, with as many drivers, updates, tools & applications as possible. I'd prefer to have a full featured system ready to do anything I want whenever I load it up (like KNOPPIX, etc). (I know this would not be a good setup for older systems, but most of my hardware is Pentium 4 Northwood or Prescott ready) But anyhow, best of luck, and welcome!

You are WRONG. Ext2 is NOT journaled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2 Ext3 can be read as "journaled Ext2": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3 jaclaz Ah, stupid of me. I already knew that ext3 was journaled, and when I was posting that I looked too quickly at the beginning of that ext2 Wikipedia page and saw "journaling file system" and then didn't read the rest. My apologies dencorso.

Yep, that's the question. Patching the FAT32 filesystem sounds like a good idea if it's possible, however I can see how this might be a somewhat awkward process if one had to install the patched VFAT.VXD on each and every machine (And this would no doubt include 2K/XP/Vista/Win7 machines as well I assume) that he wanted to be able to write a 4GB+ file to or use a FAT32 formatted flash disk in for said purpose. Is there a possiblility of writing a Windows 98 driver for exFAT? I have seen it mentioned on here before, not sure of the legalities involved, but provided it's not illegal I think it would be a very useful utility. EDIT: Never mind, I see on Wikipedia that Microsoft is still charging a licensing fee for exFAT implementations.

Most (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Linux file systems are journaling file systems - including ext2, so that would just lead back to the same problem as NTFS in this situation.

Whenever I'm finished with my flash drive at college this week I think I may just reformat it, from what you all are telling me it seems to have some bizarre settings. @rloew - While you're here I'd appreciate your input on the question I asked jaclaz in the other thread.

I read over those threads, good useful info! I have a question though - is there a non-journaling file system that can be used to format a flash disk that can support files larger than 4GB, and still be read by Windows 98? I saw someone mention/suggest formatting disks with UDF in another thread, but I am unfamiliar with it. It would be handy to have such a filesystem, that way it would be possible to save a DVD image on a flash drive (even if you were only going to actually USE it on an XP/NTFS system) but still have access to any other smaller files on the flash disk in Windows 98.

Ok Guys, thanks for all your help so far. I'm going to be needing my flash drive at college the next couple of days, and it's all a WinXP environment there, so I'm not going to run any more experiments just yet. As soon as that's over, Ill resume the quest to figure out what's going on with it. @jaclaz I have a question that's semi-related to this, but probably more appropriate in this thread. Will post there. Flash Drives Wearing Out ?

Ok, I used HDHacker and got the Logical Drive no problem. (Text output had Kingston in it). The Physical Drive output I'm not 100% sure of, I couldn't select it by drive letter or type, just had numbers 0-9. Numbers 0, 1, 2 returned a sector output. The first one (0) was obviously my primary hdd because i saw some text in the output that obviously was my boot loader. The second (1) I assumed to be my second hdd, and the third (2) output must be the flash drive. Hope this is what you needed. MBRPBR.zip

Ok, tried the KB240075 UHCD.SYS hotfix, didn't change anything. Here's the readout from ChipGenius: While in XP to run ChipGenius, I verified again that the drive was read/writable in XP, no data loss or problems of any kind. I remember when I first put the new blank drive in Win 98, it showed up with 14.(xxx something) GB free, so I assumed there wouldn't be any problems, guess I was wrong.

I'm having a strange problem with one of my flash drives. Running Win98SE, NUSB 3.3 installed. (also verified this same error on 2 other computers running NUSB) I have 2 flash drives, one is 256mb and the other is a new Kingston 16gb Data Traveler. When I first installed NUSB, they both worked fine, and I could read/write to/from both of them. A few days ago, I tried to use the 16gb disk and it is recognized properly as a disk drive, but when I click on it in Windows Explorer it says "The disk in drive G is not formatted. Would you like to format it?" The other (256mb) flash disk is not affected. The 16gb disk shows up fine in Windows XP and in openSUSE 11, is read/writable and shows as being formatted with FAT32. Any ideas on why this disk is suddenly not recognized properly by Win98? On a last note, I did notice that the 16gb disk now has over 2gb of data on it. Could this be causing some sort of error based on the 2gb file size limit (the data is NOT in one file though) ?? I know that the size of DVDs are incorrectly reported as 1.99GB, but all of their data still shows up and is accessible. Thought this info might be of assistance.

Thanks bristols, the User Agent Switcher solved the problem Setting the User Agent to: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14" solves the problem if anyone else runs into this. I emailed MySpace support about it whenever it first happened, (wasn't expecting much, haha) and of course they were extremely helpful , here's the garbage they sent me: Quite ridiculous since as I mentioned before, the page loads perfectly in IE6, which is certainly much more outdated than Firefox 2. @rainyd - You must be using KernelEx to have Flash Player 10, I'm just running straight 98SE w/ RAM Patch.

Tried to go to MySpace this evening, and got this error: Running 98SE, Firefox 2.0.0.20, IE6 SP1 installed, Flash Player 9. No mods except rloew's RAM patch. What's idiotic about this, is that MySpace will load in IE6!!! Saw an earlier topic about spoofing the User Agent to make sites display in IE6, is there a way to use the same principle to have Firefox report a newer version?

I would be interested, but I also don't have a 512MB card. I might look into buying one if I can find one that I like. I prefer ATI cards, does anyone know of an ATI 512MB AGP card that has 98 drivers? I am already using the Catalyst 6.2 driver pack with my 9800 XT, and if I go into my adapter driver settings and view all hardware, the newest card listed is the x800 XT Platinum Edition which only came in 256MB versions.

Look in the "Important / "Stickified" / Pinned Windows 98/98 SP1/98 SE/ME Topics" thread and go down to "Comprehensive Packs" and take a look at soporific's Auto Patcher and Unattended Boot CD. I have not used either of these myself, but I remember reading about them and it sounds like it might be what you're looking for.

(Repeat of a post made in another topic, but I felt it was relevant here as well as this is a compatibility thread.) I'm not saying you're wrong, but I recently installed 95C on a P4 2.0GHz machine and had to use the amdk6upd patch. Probably even the Intel processors at some point above the processor you used hit a limit where the patch is needed.

I know for a fact that there are Win95 Drivers for a 128MB Radeon 8500 - I have the disk and have installed them recently. As far as Radeons after that, I am almost certain there are vxd drivers for them, but I can't remember right at the moment.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I recently installed 95C on a P4 2.0GHz machine and had to use the amdk6upd patch. Probably even the Intel processors at some point above the processor you used hit a limit where the patch is needed.

There is a patch that corrects this error in 95. However, with a 1GHz processor and 256 RAM, 98SE will run fine. It's really up to you to decide whether or not you need the newer software & hardware support that 98SE can give you.

Ahh... I can make my first post in a thread that I know something about.. heh. Windows 95 does have problems with many CPU's higher than 350 MHz. (Windows Protection Error in IOS.VXD) However, Microsoft and AMD issued a fix for this (amdk6upd.exe - remember when K6-2 Super Socket 7's were the screaming processor? lol ) This patch fixes the problem with processors up to 2.1 GHz, where a second problem occurs. (Windows Protection Error in NDIS.VXD) I spent many hours trying to get around this problem. This problem also affects 98FE, and M$ issued a hotfix for 98FE. The hotfix will not work on Windows 95.. I tried pulling files out of it and installing them manually, etc etc, it did not work. Here's what happens: 95 will install properly, then on the reboot you will get the first (IOS) error. After patching this error, you will get the second one (NDIS). I tried copying versions of ndis.vxd from the 98FE hotfix and from 98SE and putting them into 95, but this was unsuccessful. Being exasperated at this point, I just went and deleted ndis.vxd and then it gave another error concerning nwredir.vxd so I deleted it as well. Then - lo and behold, it said those two files were missing, press a key to continue.. and 95 loaded up. Only one more error message was displayed, "The NetWare compatible shell is unavailable." then, 95 went happily about its business. All this was done on a 3.06 GHz P4 HT machine. So - other than networking functions, 95 will run on processors faster than 2.1GHz. Getting there is rough, and the lack of networking (dial up, broadband, etc) effectively kills a lot of usefulness; but it CAN be done. (I'll bet Rudolph Loew could fix it ) As far as I know, Windows 98 SE does not have a limit on the speed of processor it can use (or at least it hasn't been hit yet).