jaclaz

MS-DOS is a completely different system from what a cmd.exe (running inside a NT based OS) is, I posted earlier how a minimal XP-based system with cmd.exe as shell has been developed : (and the command processor in DOS is command.com, that is different from cmd.exe), the fact that in cmd.exe you can run (some) DOS programs doesn't mean that it is in any way a MS-DOS. @awkduck In the contest of Win3.x/9x, it is actually a "dos box", in XP it is NOT. JFYI, there are a couple "improved" command processors for 9x that bring to it some features of the cmd.exe: https://msfn.org/board/topic/100861-winxp-cmdexe-renamed-to-commandcom/ http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=2392 jaclaz

By whom? DOSBox is an emulator for dos. https://www.dosbox.com/ In XP it is called "Command Prompt". jaclaz

Only for the record (and only as pure anecdata), in the (good ol') times I used extensively BBlean/BB4Win for a minimal XP project ideated by Dietmar[1] and it was very stable (though possibly it was due to the overall minimization of the install). jaclaz [1] http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=3717 that later evolved - thanks to Misty - into the MiniXP http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=16765 http://mistyprojects.co.uk/minixp/docs/files/index.html

Which is good as I cannot understand the contents either (I like symmetry ). @DrunkenTanker Maybe you could post a couple of examples of the tool use, I cannot understand if it is related to broken links, deleted files with still references *somewhere* or what exactly (the PATH environment variable? ). jaclaz

As said, only very old hard disks used a parking zone on the platter, now (and since many years) they use parking ramps instead: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/stiction https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/loadunload-ramp As an example on this page you can see the parking ramp that modern hard disks use, and an old disk with CSS (a Quantum Fireballl 12 GB in capacity): https://aesonlabs.ca/blogs/what-is-inside-a-hard-drive-complete-stripdown/ jaclaz

Maybe very old hard disks. Nowadays (that means since 15 or 20 years) Heads are "parked" and (hopefully) NEVER actually touch anything, the "stiction" you refer to: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/stiction could happen only on some models of drives (where the heads, instead of an external ramp, were parked on an outer area of the platter. Of course when operating it is possible by accident that the heads touch the platter and get stuck, but that is a "seriously damaged" disk. The issue with some disks may be (but it is a rare case and actually a symptom of a failing drive) that the bearing, usually in disks that have not been used for a long time, but not always, gets stuck. In those cases the drive needs to be opened and there is the need of some serious force to turn the platter/motor manually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAHJGiKj8s0 The actual HD motor simply has so little torque that it cannot start spinning the platter, but if stuck should not overdraw current, the PCB's of the disk should take care of that (built-in overcurrent protection). The real issue with these "power bricks" (no matter if 1, 2 or 5A) is that usually they are not protected against short circuit. Modern hard disks have a protection by means of a TVS diode, in some cases the TVS (Transient Voltage Suppressor) diode can be "shot", there are usually two of these diodes, one on the 5V and one on the 12 V rail, the idea is that if something happens, the diode blows and short circuits to ground the + rail in order to prevent possible worst damages to the disk PCB, desktops and laptops power supplies sense the short circuit and shut off immediately, those "power bricks" may well be fried. jaclaz

5A? The hungriest disk I had around, an old IDE 3.5" is rated for 960 mA@12V, all "power bricks" for external 3.5" disks I have seen (and also power adapters for "loose" interfaces) tend to be 2A@5V+2A@12V. I do not exclude that in some cases 2A@12V may be not enough, but it should be a very rare exception. jaclaz

I had a look, and can confirm that nircmd has a provision to act when a process is closed (waitprocess). Of course it needs to be tested specifically if it causes too much CPU usage and if it works in this case. nircmd also has a "start hidden" command (exec or exec2 /hide) so it could be used instead of cmdow. jaclaz

Only if it is a 3.5" disk. Most 2.5" can be powered by the USB port, though, it depends, some disks may need an Y-USB cable to get the power from two USB ports, example: https://www.kmsoltec.com/53132-large_default/cavo-y-2-x-usb-20-tipo-a-maschio-1x-usb-20-tipo-a-femmina-20-cm.jpg and some motherboards may provide less (or more) than the standard 500mA@5V on the USB port. jaclaz

Well, I had a quick look at the files posted together with the video, from those it seems like the install for which they were made (at least the boot.ini) was a single partition, if you are using separate boot and system partitions you may need to correct it (if using it) and/or the BCD (the "device" and/or "osdevice" element). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/bcd-system-store-settings-for-uefi?view=windows-11 jaclaz

You need a loop checking that the process is running, issue may be that continuous loops in batch use lots of CPU time, so usually a timeout is inserted in the loop, since a timeout/sleep command is not available in XP, you will need a third party tool or use one of the poor man's alternatives, such as Ping. AutoIt does not use as much CPU as batch AFAICR, still a timeout/sleep would probably be needed. There are workarounds, like the excellent: https://www.bill2-software.com/processmanager/ but it seems to me like a bit too complex if a quick AutoIt would do it. (this is a sort of taskmanager that - among many other features - allows to monitor a process and do something whenever the process is started or closed) BTW if start /wait works, you can use/spawn a child process, check: https://ss64.com/nt/start.html maybe you don't want to use the /b option? Start /wait has a whole number of issues, you need a lot of experiments to find the "right" command line. jaclaz

I am not sure to have understood the question, but there is nircmd that can kill a process from batch (or tasklist/taskkill). Why would the focus on a window matter? jaclaz

What do you mean exactly? (please describe your setup) An issue with arcpaths in boot.ini (or *something else* in the BCD, [1])? jaclaz [1] but the BCD should not be involved for XP booting

In theory, yes, in practice no, in the sense that (IMHO) the time that will be needed to create a perfectly working automated installation disk with drivers/updates/programs will take you far more time than making many (and I mean many) normal, attended, manual installations. If you have the need to make a few tens or hundreds of installations (on exactly the same hardware, on different hardware it will be much worse), than it will be justified, if you install or re-install every few months or so, it doesn't really makes sense, and if you have only one or a few machines, it is much more convenient to setup the system manually and then image the install. jaclaz

These kind of tools (like the Paragon one) are "low-level" enough to be likely to conflict with one of the zillion modifications/patches and what not a "modern" 9x/Me system will have, but Jumper is correct, if you are hot-plugging the disk drive, don't, hot-plug support in 9x/Me tends to be shaky at best and most of the used USB drivers are as well often not-so-stable. jaclaz

DOS/9x tools have always worked on the "most common" at the time NTFS, that is the version used in 2000 and XP. It is not a very good idea to use NT4 NTFS, as it anyway will be converted to the "new" Windows 2000 version as soon as a newer windows NT OS will access it (and this - depending on the NT4 install - may make it become inaccessble by NT4), of course this is not a problem in a DOS/9x/ME (and NT4) ONLY environment/setup. Read Only NTFS is "easy", and usually works fairly well, for 9x I would recommend the lesser known: https://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-reader/ (now "Linux Reader") https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ which in my experience has proved its utility several times (for recovery purposes). The "several drivers/tools" are very likely to have created conflicts, you try ONE of them, then you uninstall/delete it, and then try another one. Read/Write tools have their issues, though a number of them do not depend on the tool, but rather to other factors involved with large filesystems and/or large sized files on them. Read/write there is - I believe - only the Paragon tool still available: https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Paragon-NTFS-for-Win98.shtml jaclaz

Which is "another" way to do what I suggested earlier (hiding the "other" partition through a bootmanager). If a partition is marked as "hidden" it is "more protected" than having the drive letter removed. Probably you missed in my earlier post how the hiding (of the "other" partition, and the unhiding of the currently chosen one) in a bootmanager works, it is done on-the-fly at boot time, before the old (or new) OS is booted. The "other" partition is never auto-mounted by the "current" OS (as opposed to be automounted but without a drive letter). Typical grub4dos menu.lst example: title Windows 2000 hide (hd0,1) unhide (hd0,0) makeactive (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 (or chainloader /ntldr) title Windows 7 hide (hd0,0) unhide (hd0,1) makeactive (hd0,1) root (hd0,1) chainloader +1 (or chainloader /bootmgr) (the makeactive directive might be not strictly needed, but by including it when the ntldr or the bootmgr loads the disk will appear as a "standard" disk with the "current" partition active) jaclaz

@awkduck Yep, but though grub4dos can do *almost anything* it can only be used to re-order (or hide/remove, or add) disks/volumes, etc. the drive lettering remains the "default" automatic MS one, so you won't be able through it to actually "assign" drive letters as letter assigner can, besides the complexity (which is relative, it is not difficult to use grub4dos after an initial learning of the basics of it) you simply cannot obtain some letter combinations. Subst can be used in some cases, though. jaclaz

If I recall correctly there are more than one possible ways to have DOS in WinME (three or four of them). Maybe you can try the "other" one(s), I seem to remember that at least one of them needs not patching the IO.SYS (but still it may not be compatible with letter assigner). The "latest" one (using files from LTOOLS.DTA) may also work, but cannot really say, the explanations in MDGGX's TIPSME:TXT are rather confusing. TIPSME.TXT is inside W95-11D.ZIP https://www.mdgx.com/bin/W95-11D.ZIP jaclaz

Good. jaclaz

JFYI, in the good ol' times of DOS, there was only one text editor that I liked (shareware), called Qedit (everyone had it as q.exe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_SemWare_Editor jaclaz

Maybe. But first it is needed to test if a .pif made on Windows 98 dies actually work on ME (it is entirely possible that the "old" setting is ignored), and if it works, it has to be seen if it is worth it (as opposed to hex-edit a single byte, which may possibly be automated in a batch script). What you should try would be: 1) make a .pif for your executable on windows 98 without the setting 2) make .pif for your excutable on Windows 98 with the setting 3) make a .pif for your executable on Windows ME (of course without the setting) 4) test all three .pifs on Windows ME and verify that all work as expected 5) post the three .pifs so that we can check that differences are where they should be jaclaz

Sure you are not :). Sed is waaay more powerful than gsar and much more suited to this task than gsar (and in some versions sed can also use Regex expressions), but as I said earlier it is much more complex and BTW I suspect that the "generalization/simplification" of the search/replace string by the OP may not be entirely accurate, I think he should post an example text with more specific data than AAAA and aaaa, as they risk to be misinterpreted, resulting in a "non working" suggestion. jaclaz

You might need two passes with gsar: 1) [SPACE]AAAA[SPACE] 2) [SPACE]AAAA[CR][LF] (this of course does *another* thing from what you asked, instead of ignoring what is inside quotes, it picks what is between spaces or between a space and newline, taken from your example) SED is probably more suited, but it is of course much more complex. jaclaz

Yep , the files from RainyShadow have the Windows 286 section before the Windows 386 one, that is 16h (section header) +6h (section length). Could it be that the files by Rainyshadow are for the original DOSPROMPT pif (that has the 286 section) and your tests are with another "generic" .pif (missing the 286 section), I doubt that different installs of Windows 98 may have different files structure (or different sections order) but it is of course well possible. But once it is confirmed that it is the same byte, according to the doc: 01 means "Prevent Windows detection" (not "Close on Exit", maybe it is a translation issue of sorts, as the Author of the doc is probably Russian) 04 means "Not automatically offer transition in a MS-DOS mode" 10 means "Not warn before transition in a MS-DOS mode" jaclaz