eidenk

Here is some System Restore doc from Microsoft : Troubleshooting System Restore in Windows Millennium Edition How to Start the System Restore Tool from a Command Prompt Checkpoints that you create after September 8, 2001 do not restore your computer My advice would be not to rely too much on System Restore and devise your own backup/restore strategy. I believe that with System Restore you'll always reach a point where you'll be screwed with it. You can disable it under Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Troubleshooting or you can remove it using System Restore Remover Sorry this does not answer too much your question.

mamas6667 If you look at the Dlls that are now in your system you'll see that there is a new one Ti891711.dll. It is probably permanently loaded by the OS though invisible from a too simple process viewer. How can you know, as you haven't measured anything, that it consumes less ressources than the MS files ? I would like to test the vulnerability myself. As you say that Tihy's does the job, I assume you know what to do to test it. Could you explain me what I must do ?

In case this is a bug, it'll never be fixed. So here is a workaround that probably works :Set the Time Zone on your machine. Right click on the taskbar and choose Adjust Date/Time as you probably know. If you want a finer TimeZone setup you'll need to use the Time Zone Editor that is on your your 98SE CD at \tools\reskit\config\tzedit.exe. Once this is done, export the values from the registry by runing the following batch file : @echo off regedit /e TimeZone.reg "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation" Copy and paste in Notepad and save as whatever.bat. Run it. For your setup keep default US timezone and add Timezone.reg to your Batch Setup through the Advanced Options tab. You can't do this with MS cab archives I think. But what you can probably do is extract the cab, replace the file and recompress a new cab of the same name to replace the old one. I do not know if the new cab will be suitable for a Windows setup but I can say that I have recompressed my Win ME cabs this way with IzArc to be able to use the Win98 System File Checker on Win ME.

@At0mic You should have seen the thread with the quote box in the siggie to truly understand my post. For the rest bumbles had already posted an opinion so I had my say as well. I prefer this than complaining to a moderator in the back of someone. So apologies to everyone I might have offended. Next time I'll PM the posters. That's what I should have done probably. Now I will tell you something else before PMing anyone : You comment on someone else's siggie in your last post after having told me I was out of order for doing so myself. Will you please now stick yourself to the standards you expect from others. Question closed as far as far as I am concerned. @daveybluenose It's not that straightforward sometimes to install Windows from scratch with just a CD-ROM and an unformatted drive. I don't do this often so I would not really be able to tell you more than the aproximate following : You need fdisk.exe from the boot floppy to create your partition and set it active. Then once this is done you need to format it. I am not sure whether Windows Setup automatically formats an unformated drive. Anyway format.com is in the win9x folder of your CD along with the installation cabs and some other tools. "format C:" without the quotes is what you must type. As well you want to set your BIOS to boot on the CD so that you can boot into Setup. Consult your motherboard manual as to how to do so. As well as your drive is not new, I would strongly suggest that, before all, you erase its data by runing a dedicated wiping utility as to avoid potential problems with shaddow partitions. You don't need to overwrite the whole disk but run it one hour or two to make sure the beginning of the disk is properly overwritten. You may want to download the Ultimate Boot CD to do so. There are several tools to choose from on it plus plenty of other extremely useful utilities.

<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

I thought your only concern is have a lot of saved personal work on hard drive and will be a complete nightmare if i loose all this saved work. missing dll files, shlwapi.dll

azagahl How do you manage to assess that scandisk worked above the 137 GB ?I assume you are speaking about scandisk.exe run from Dos and not scandskw.exe run from Windows. At some point, when I was filling the 200/183 GB partition to test the 137/128 GB limit, the C Drive property sheet did grossly misreport the values of used and empty space after some crash due to my stupidity. The property sheet indicated 8Gb of used space when in fact there were around 90. However selecting all files and folders in the drive gave the right byte count. I rebooted with the floppy and run scandisk who fixed several errors. I then rebooted without problems into windows and checked that the C property sheet was indicating the right values. It was. I then resumed filling space with data until I reached the 137/128 which quickly terminated my windows session as well as my windows installation as I state above. I cannot understand how you manage to assess that scandisk worked above the 137/128 GB limit as in my experience it is impossible to attempt to write data above this limit without corrupting files on the partition. Please could you be more precise as to what you exactly did and what happened ? Do you mean you saw random ascii character when you used a disk editor to look at the data on some particular sectors of your trashed partition ? I am curious. You say you are using a special PDR file. Which one and for which reason ?Tihiy He claims Microsoft claims 512 GB limit for those tools. Does all this mean that there is no problem for working with DOS beyond the 137/128 GB limit ? Could I theorically fill the disk with data beyond the limit witout corrupting anything with DOS only ? Something that may be of interest to you : the GPL fix for LBA48 adressing for the Xbox. Xbox FAT32 drives are properly handled beyond the limit with it. Xbox Tool, Breaking The 137 Gb Limit, Can we update the IDE driver ?, Largest Hard Drive Still 137gb ?

What do you exactly mean here ?In my experience, you can define a 200 GB HDD in one single partition with Windows Me fdisk and then format and run setup and successfully install Windows and run its tools without problems including scandisk, but Windows will not write a single bit of data above the 137xxxxxxxxx bits limit (128 GB). Instead it will write the data that you want to write above the limit at the beginning of the disk and will destroy your system by overwriting files located there maybe even the FAT but I can't exactly say. It does not however overwrite the MBR, unlike what Petr said in another thread. And unlike I have said myself when relating the results of my test. I copied data on my 200/183 GB HDD formated in one partition with Windows Me running. I did use Total Copy for doing so. When I reached the 137/128 GB limit, I received errors messages saying it wasn't possible to copy anything anymore. I tried to unsuccesfully to resume copy several times. I tried then to launch some apps but all crashed by throwing a black error message on a white box (you know which ones I mean). Then explorer similarly crashed and the system was unusable. I successfully managed to reboot the disk but it didn't go past the logo screen. After that it was a full screen of random ASCII characters. I'll try to do some forensics on the drive tommorow or so to see what has been damaged. I assume that this should be safe as scandisk is not aware of partition 2 when it works on partition 1 and works within and not beyond the 137/128 GB limit. I suppose you don't ignore scandisk can be disabled from automatically running in msconfig. One think I wonder about scandisk is what file it does use to access the file system when it is not run from within windows ? Does it still use ESDI_506.PDR ? If yes it is possible that scandisk works perfectly well for any partition size up to the 2 TB limit of the FAT32 filesystem once ESDI_506.PDR is fixed.

What do you exactly mean here ?In my experience, you can define a 200 GB HDD in one single partition with Windows Me fdisk and then format and run setup and successfully install Windows and run its tools without problems including scandisk, but Windows will not write a single bit of data above the 137xxxxxxxxx bits limit (128 GB). Instead it will write the data that you want to write above the limit at the beginning of the disk and will destroy your system by overwriting files located there maybe even the FAT but I can't exactly say. It does not however overwrite the MBR, unlike what Petr said in another thread. And unlike I have said myself when relating the results of my test. I copied data on my 200/183 GB HDD formated in one partition with Windows Me running. I did use Total Copy for doing so. When I reached the 137/128 GB limit, I received errors messages saying it wasn't possible to copy anything anymore. I tried to unsuccesfully to resume copy several times. I tried then to launch some apps but all crashed by throwing a black error message on a white box (you know which ones I mean). Then explorer similarly crashed and the system was unusable. I successfully managed to reboot the disk but it didn't go past the logo screen. After that it was a full screen of random ASCII characters. I'll try to do some forensics on the drive tommorow or so to see what has been damaged. I assume that this should be safe as scandisk is not aware of partition 2 when it works on partition 1 and works within and not beyond the 137/128 GB limit. I suppose you don't ignore scandisk can be disabled from automatically running in msconfig. One think I wonder about scandisk is what file it does use to access the file system when it is not run from within windows ? Does it still use ESDI_506.PDR ? If yes it is possible that scandisk works perfectly well for any partition size up to the 2 TB limit of the FAT32 filesystem once ESDI_506.PDR is fixed.

RegTick

crayzee's patcher I don't know if it's good but it seems to do what you are after.

VERY NASTY It copies up to 137 GB and bang all running programs crash and you can't reboot. This is the worst bug there is in Windows. It is a f***ing scandal that this has not been fixed by M$. And they claim their OSes on FAT32 handles 2 TB.

Petr As you've seen I've already more or less answered and had the same question to you. You understand by this that I did not go past the 137 GB limit with data. My C: drive is almost empty and was just about to be partitioned for multibooting in fact. Yes, of course I use ESDI506.PDR. IOS.VXD is listed as well. I now fear it is used as well by my 250 GB Serial ATA drive who has 108 GB of data I would hate to loose or spend hours or even days recovering it. I will forget partitioning C:\ for now. Will now back up my system on another drive and will fill C: with junk until I reach this barrier. I'll give feedback in a reasonable delay as to what happens. See ya.

Reinstall windows on top of itself. If you are a totally clueless the easiest way is using the Windows Me CD-Rom. Otherwise boot from the startup floppy, switch to C:\ and then type C:\windows\options\install\setup.exe (your setup files should be there) and press the enter key. You will loose some windows settings rhat will return to default and Windows Setup will reinstall some components you might have removed as well as it will I think overwrite any security or critical update you might have installed. You shouldn'tt loose third party sofware settings nor any personal files. You can as well get the shlwapi.dll file from another computer that doesn't need to be Win ME as this file is part of Internet Explorer and can be found on all systems. In 2000/XP it will be probably located in the winnt\system32 directory. Copy that file on a floppy and boot with your startup disk. Once you have booted remove the startup floppy and replace it by the floppy on which you have copied shlwapi.dll and type : copy shlwapi.dll C:\windows\system or copy A:\shlwapi.dll C:\windows\system\shlwapi.dll Press enter enter and reboot after the file is copied. If it works this way, it's better than reinstalling. But can you boot into safe mode ? If yes it is even easier to replace the file : Start your computer and repeatedly type the F8 key. At some point you'll get a screen asking you how you want to start Windows. Choose Safe Mode. If you can enter Windows this way, click on the Start Button and then choose Run. Type msconfig.exe. Choose extract file, follow the instructions and choose to restore the file from either C:\windows\options\install or the Windows ME CD (win9x folder I think) to windows\system. Reboot. Hope this helps.

Changing Hard Drive this way has been no problem for me but I wouldn't say the same with motherboards where each time I finally had to reinstall the OS from scratch. What do you mean there ? Next time I'll have to upgrade hardware I'll try preptool to see if it does work how it is claimed.

Have you already been there yourself ? Are you sure of what you are saying ? If true it's big issue. And I would expect hard drives manufacturers to warn their customers of that issue as well as I would expect Microsoft to issue a fix as they still support the Win98SE/ME platform. Sorry Gape I did not read Petr before posting.

The above quote is from Seagate. Since Windows 95 OSR2 and the introduction of FAT 32, Windows supports partitions of up to 2 TB.

What do you mean ? I have crossed it without problems on very standard hardware it seems.I've read the doc entirely and if I had to believe what he writes, my system wouldn't handle my disks without his patch.

Can you explain me how I did successfully format the C:\ Drive to 200 GB (183 in fact. 200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.) with fdisk from the the WinMe CD when the nforce motherboard drivers weren't installed. As well, after install of Win Me the drive was recognized as a 183 GB though the nForce motherboard drivers weren't installed yet. 200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think. As well I have looked in device properties and it does not seem to me that nForce has installed any driver to handle HDDs. The IDE controllers are standard Microsoft. I have unpatched ESDI_506.PDR in my IOSUBSYS folder.

Well my above system handles 200 and 250 GB without additional controller card or the Intel Application Accelerator. Athlon 2600 on Abit NF7S nForce2 chipset. The 200 GB drive has been spinning under ME (and maybe 98 but I can't be sure anymore) on an MSI motherboard with a Duron and then the above Athlon. I would think one may think he needs that stuff only if one wants to plug large capacity drives on VERY OLD motherboards. I am far from being an expert but I think this thing maybe a rip-off as I don't see how a driver patch can affect the limitations of the BIOS. In those cases I am not sure one can do anything if one can't flash the BIOS with a firmware upgrade. Thanks to correct me if I am wrong.

200 GB IDE and 250 GB SATA in one partition each in my Win ME box here with no patch (+ 120 GB IDE with two partitions). The first has been formatted with ME fdisk and the second one with Paragon Partition Manager from within Windows as fdisk would not recognize it. I think the DOS7(?) 98/Me limit is two terabytes. I think scandisk does its full job as well, considering the long time it takes for a large drive with many files on it. Why use defrag when there is a 100 times better (10-20 times faster and read-write allowed on the drive being defragmented) entirely legal free copy of Diskeeper Lite that you can use forever available everywhere ? You just need to delete the html.exe (not very sure of the filename but it's easy to spot) from its folder after install to never see the nag anymore. Very generous. I've read in several places in the computer press that Windows defrag is nothing but extremely cut down Diskeeper technology.

Available in this package : http://download.microsoft.com/download/win.../WIN_DEPLOY.exe Batch 98 and Inf Install are here if you don't have them : ftp://anonymous:email%40notset.com@ftp.mi...PS/Win98/Reskit

Nice little proggie : http://www.xpertdesign.de/english/sw_xecutor_info.htm

Are you REMOTELY aware of the distribution/compatibility mess that linux is? There isn't really any mess there. Each major distro has its own collection of thousands of precompiled software packages. Before installing any of them them you know in advance you won't have any issue with them unlike when you install anything on Microsoft. Before running an installer on Microsoft you never can be sure it won't mess badly your system. Of course trying to manually install a deb package on Red Hat is almost certainly doomed to failure unless you are an expert. But you can't do it by mistake through the Red Hat package manager. If you want to be able to install anything on any distro you've got a single thing to learn, it is compiling packages from sources at the command line. When you know how to do this you can compile and install any program from its source tarballs on any distro. 2. Next, lets take you up on your offer of moving to linux. Yeah, do it. Lets see how comfortable you are on it. Well, the Mandrake installer really shames Microsoft installers. After less than an hour from inserting in the drive the install DVD you boot into the KDE desktop shell with its hundreds of various professional apps. Couldn't be easier. Try Mandrake Move, the live CD. Or Debian Live Knoppix, you'll be amazed and soon you'll dual boot your Windows box with a flavor of Linux. Handy anyway as Linux systems can read and write NTFS and FAT so you can perform backups and recovery operation of your Windows OSes without having to resort to console command line tools. The cons X11 doesn't match the Windows graphic subsystem. A bad shutdown is followed by a far too long and boring fix/recovery operation of the filesystem that forces to reboot the machine twice. I never bother to properly shutdown Windows. I just switch the computer off when I have finished with it. That's a very nice feature of Windows I personally find. Finally There are the similar heated debates within the Linux community than there are in the Microsoft one. One of them is KDE versus Gnome as a desktop environment of choice. In my opinion Gnome sucks as much as Longhorn does (according to reports) and KDE rocks as 98-2000 does. Another of those debates are the filesystems. Ext2 Ext3 versus Reiser. Pretty much the same arguments as FAT32 versus NTFS. Speed versus "security" of journaling. Anyway Ext2 allows already the system administator (root) to set per user permissions on files or folders.

What about the speed of file operations ? I do not use XP but I did dual boot my ME with 2000 SP2 for some time and all I can remember is that deleting a file to the recycle bin was painfully slow with 2000 and instant with ME. Almost a second lag between clicking delete and the file icon disappearing. I must say that I did not format the 2000 in NTFS but in FAT32 and that 2000 was totaly unoptimized unlike ME. It would be interesting I think to hear about people dual-booting 98 with XP, as there are some, with respect to file system speed.