jaclaz

For NO apparent reason jaclaz

Well, at least you have to start crying for the money that it will cost you recovering them (if possible) . Have you tried imaging backwards? (sometimes it helps) Not really. Seagate had a division, called i365, that did data recovery and AFAICU is now "incorporated" in Seagate: http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/ http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/consumers/in-lab-data-recovery/ The other "big name" is Kroll-Ontrack: http://www.krollontrack.com/ There are tens or hundreds of independent professional firms that do this kind of business. A few words of advice are needed. It is extremely difficult to understand if any of these companies is made of actual professionals (or however people that know where their towel is). The risk with a not-known company is that the guy that is going to actually open the hard disk will be using under-standard tools and actually know very little on how to deal with a serious disk issues (but on the other hand "independent" data recovery companies happened to recover disks that "mainstream" ones gave for dead). The risk with a "very large company" is that your disk will go in the hands of an underpaid "trained monkey", using the best tools of the world but lacking the dirve (if you pardon me the pun) to actually solve the issue of customer #12345678 if it is anything outside common standard procedures. You will need to make contacts with a few of them and follow your instinct , there are companies that will make - upon free examination of the disk drive - a detailed diagnosis and quote for the specific recovery attempt, other that will charge you anyway a flat examination fee, and some that will provide you with a flat rate for the recovery attempt without even having a look at the disk. It is not unlikely that you will find people quoting anything between US$ 300.00 and US$ 3,000.00 and unfortunately you have no way to know if the first number is a good deal and the second is a rip-off or if the first is nonsense and the second is adequate. A good way to know which kind of people they are is the presence of a "clean room" in their advertisement/site, then physically go to their firm and ask to see it (from the outside is OK). AFAICT most "not major" firms do not have a clean room and use instead a laminar flow bench (which BTW is fine in itself), when a firm advertises the use of a "clean room" and all it has is instead a laminar flow hood, it should tell you something about their reliability. jaclaz

JFYI, someone possibly misunderstood the sense of your post and started worrying about the death of Vista in 2017 : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170959-use-vista-after-2017/ jaclaz

Unfortunately, you are right. The idea of "compacting" or "optimizing" anything is something that does not even cross the mind of developers today, partially because of the tools/compilers that are in use nowadays, and partially because they leverage on their own (usually "top level") hardware and on the (unfortunately correct) expectation that any user will have a comparably similar in "power" hardware (usually forced by the one or the other tool that the user needs). If you want another example (still in the "extremely small" range) check : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145209-the-smallest-possible-size-of-bootsdi/ And, to corroborate your feeling , check the size growth graph of MS Office and Office-like suites: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/05/openofficeorg-microsoft-office-moores.html Please understand that such a suite has fundamentally the same possible uses and what they are used for (i.e. the actual things you can obtain from those) are exactly the same since around 20 years, sure the available (not used if not to make some banners or supposedly fun prints for office jokes/pranks and the like) cliparts and similar were greatly extended, but what else? jaclaz

Oww, come on XKCD to the rescue: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1282:_Monty_Hall and, JFYI : http://xkcd.com/1134/ jaclaz

Hmmm, usually it's liquid nitrogen, not helium, that is commonly used to keep cool crystal balls (you must have one of those cheap, made in China ones that overheat ) jaclaz.

I don't think that the built in Vista Windows Mail (which I believe is what you are wanting to use) has the features that Outlook 2003 has. AFAIK the Windows Mail is the "evolution" of Outlook Express, i.e. a "consumer version" of a "professional tool" (Outlook). You may want to try Zimbra desktop: http://www.zimbra.com/products/zimbra-desktop/index.html but importing contacts, Rules, etc. will likely, if possible at all, be a nightmare . emclient: http://www.emclient.com/features is said to be a "direct competitor" to Outlook, and seemingly has some facilities for migrating, but I have never actually tested it (I use Opera M2 and see no real reason to change it for anything else, given my limited - or primitive if you prefer - needs for e-mail). jaclaz

Maybe the "false" info is about IE 5 and greater combined with the OS. IE6 should be supported fine, actually up to IE7 Beta1: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5079/Mouse-Gestures-for-Internet-Explorer maybe it is the combination of Win98 and IE6 that causes the issue. jaclaz

Can you rate (in a 0 to 10 scale) what is the actual relevance (if any) and/or practical use of such piece of info? If you find any relevance in it. (or practical use) for the info, i.e. you assigned more than 0 to the question, what is the particular aspect that you feel important? I mean, when the *whatever* will come out will actually come out, it will be called in the *whatever* way the good MS guys will see fit, but what's in a name? It can be: Pessimistic: the usual abomination, called 8.2 the usual abomination, called 9 the usual abomination, called "Curtains 1.0"Optimistic: a good OS, called 8.2 a good OS, called 9 a good OS, called "New Panorama"The relevant point seems to me whether it will be a good release or not. , and we might get to know that once it will be available. jaclaz

jaclaz

What do you mean "it fails to register"? Can you try manually registering it with regsvr32? http://ss64.com/nt/regsvr32.html jaclaz

@Click Beetle Dx There is still some difficulties in understanding the setup you have. What do you exactly mean by "Dial-up"? Do you have an actual modem inside that machine? Do you have an actual modem (external and connected through a serial cable or USB)? (either analogic or ISDN) Or, like anyone else nowadays you have a Lan card (Ethernet) with an Ethernet cable connecting the PC to a DSL router/modem ? Please let's leave alone for the moment the USB tethering to your cellphone, which is the hardest to trouble shoot usually and the Wi-Fi, since you seemingly have not a local Wi-Fi at home (or where you normally are when posting). Describe with as much detail as you can the hardware involved in what you call "dial up internet". jaclaz

It seems like you are having several "bad areas". As said your best option next is ddrescue under Linux, using a Log: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html Usually it can recover as much as it is possible. What are the temperatures of that disk drive? It is a good idea to "keep it cool" (like by putting it under the airflow of a fan) when doing intentsive i/o (like imaging/cloning). jaclaz

Hey, kid, remember that the particularly outdated "style of computing" is what very likely allowed your dead (or mom, or both) to procure what you eat and the place where you live and that it is the thing that allowed you grow long enough to be able to express your (senseless) opinions now. Consider also how the electricity that you are using to operate your hardware gets to your home because a number of engineers used and still are using that style of computing and do it rightly. jaclaz

@kostas275 Try doing the power off by disconnecting the power cable, and waiting one minute. No matter if *needed*, it has worked fine with the power off step. @Azurlake Shouting really hard at hardware is a known technique that I personally use, when needed, but you need to be trained to use it, and often some plainer threatening works fine: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/139328-disc-drive-unable-to-eject/?p=891753 (farting is of course a no-no for the obvious minimum level of education and dignity , and the push-ups serve no purpose whatever ) jaclaz

OT , and completely unlike useful for your actual issue , some old time wise words to ponder upon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_from_the_frying_pan_into_the_fire jaclaz

You have to consider how - among all programming chores - kernel level programming is one of the most difficult ones (if not outright the most difficult one). ones. I wouldn't advice anyone to start from it. You normally need a decent familiarity with C/ C++ and with writing programs in userland before attempting to go down to kernel level. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Windows_Programming/User_Mode_vs_Kernel_Mode jaclaz

Well, when I am having difficulties to produce some nonsensical statement, I often use the Hal Berenson's site to get inspiration. By saying everything (and the opposite of it), multiple times, it can happen to get something right, on average 50 % of the times, and is rather easy, now, to acknowledge that Windows 8 is a failure (and putting all the blame on Sinofsky - whom surely has a lot of responsabilities but cannot be the only root of all evil). What is not bold (and often totally apodictic) statements is petty talk and chattering about people working at MS (and how much they failed in whatever they are/were up to or more generally badmouthing everyone else but himself). If you go through his (to be fair, once cleaned off the badmouthing of every software product on Earth , and of all the other people in the business , seemingly quite honest ) recalling of the failure of his own startup "PredictableIT": http://www.zoominfo.com/CachedPage/?archive_id=0&page_id=1902037377&page_url=//www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/de/Berenson/default.mspx&page_last_updated=2008-02-21T10:48:11&firstName=Hal&lastName=Berenson http://hal2020.com/2012/06/06/anatomy-of-a-startup-predictableit-part-i/ http://hal2020.com/2012/06/11/anatomy-of-a-startup-predictableit-part-ii/ http://hal2020.com/2012/08/31/anatomy-of-a-startup-predictableit-part-iii/ You might see how much similarities there are (were) between his own "business model" and the ones he now widely criticizes. No, most probably he is a good guy , but not someone I would rely on for "authoritative" opinions on softwares and particularly on Microsoft ones. jaclaz

Wayback Machine to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://windows98.ic.cz/chipset/intelinf.zip jaclaz

I guess we will need anyway to define "lightweight". Just yesterday it was released a new version of one of the "augmented privacy" YACBBS, SRWARE Iron: http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7502 which "portable" version is in a .zip file that expands to around 132 Mb. In my dinosaurish view, if a web browser needs (besides all the rest) two dll's (namely chrome.dll and chrome_child.dll) sized 37 Mb each it is a sign of how humanity is doomed . jaclaz

Yep. And that error would explain nicely why the filesystem is not recognized. A "normal" NTFS volume has it's $MFT starting on LCN 786432 with an 8 sectors/cluster that would make 786432*8+2048=6,293,504, the $MFT plays a vital part in filesystem recognizing and access and for the error you got it seems like that sector is in a damaged/bad area. You can try to see what happens with "ignore all", or decide to "abort". The next attempt is to try making an image of the disk using a more suitable tool for damaged disks, there is a very good one for Linux (that would make the imaging procedure automatic) and also a more manual Windows one: http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm but then you can try imaging the disk in chunks manually with DMDE, (to get the "advanced" LOG feature in it you need the Professional edition) If you are familiar enough with Linux (and command line) you can use ddrescue using a log. A succinct "theory of operation" when imaging manually in "chunks" is provided here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170288-lost-partition-and-filesystem-problem-with-adata-sh14-disk/?p=1059909 jaclaz

...provided that unticking that check box actually disables the feature.... jaclaz

Yep, 4/5 to 9/10 of this thread is to be considered obsolete. Which I cannot but tag as YACBBS (Yet Another Chromium Based Browser Spinoff). There are by now (including the senseless shift of the good Opera guys, see: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/105936-last-versions-of-software-for-windows-98se/?p=1067020 (if you wish it would be nice if you sign the petition) tens of slightly different browsers that use the same Chromium/Webkit (or nowadays "Blink") "core" engine: http://www.chromium.org/blink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browser_engines 99% of which also sport a similar "dumbified" interface. jaclaz

Possibly a stupid question, but won't a 32 bit BootIce work the same on both a 32 bit and a 64 bit OS? Or there is something that I cannot recall right now that is "bitness specfic"? In any case, if bitness specific is needed, it would make IMHO more sense to adopt a solution similar to the one gbrao used here: https://sites.google.com/site/gbrtools/home/software/bootice-portable/downloads http://reboot.pro/topic/8986-bootice-a-boot-sector-manipulation-utility-v078-released/?p=177623 where the used version is "automatically chosen". jaclaz

Good, the MBR, as expected, is fine (but is important to check it anyway).There is a single entry in it: Entry Type Boot bCyl bHead bSect eCyl eHead eSec StartSector NumSectors #0 07 80 0 32 33 1023 254 63 2048 2930272256 which is about a NTFS (or exFAT ) volume created under Vista or later (beginning on LBA 2048) sized 2,930,272,256 sectors, i.e. 1,500,299,395,072 bytes in size. Since you cannot access the logicaldrive through an assigned drive letter, you will need to use another approach to get the VBR. Now it would be about the right time to make either a dd-like image of the disk or to make a clone of it. You will need a 2 Tb disk to make an image or a 1.5 Tb disk to make a clone. Get the free version of DMDE: http://dmde.com/ and follow the instructions here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170392-how-to-recover-accidentaly-deleted-partitionfiles/page-2#entry1061689 If you decide to not make the image (either because you feel adventurous or because you don't have the money to procure a new disk), you can skip (at your own risk) to the next step, which is, still using the DMDE and the linked above instructions, to save a copy of first (say) 2100 sectors. I.e. you need to set the Start sector to 0 and the Number of sector to 2100. What is actually relevant is just the sector LBA 2048 (which is the PBR or VBR, Partition or Volume Boot Record) but having a bunch more sectors may be useful to see if strange forms of corruption happened. You also want to make a copy of the very last sector of the partition, i.e. sector 2048+2,930,272,256=2,930,274,304 which is the PBR Mirrror, i.e. it should be an exact copy of sector 2048. Compress the two resulting files into a zip archive and upload them like you did for the MBR. jaclaz