bizzybody

It boots from the drive I copied the partition to, then expanded it to fill the whole drive. That drive is physically connected as Primary Master. The problem is AFTER BOOTING, during Windows startup. It gets to the screen right before the login prompt would appear (if I didn't have it set to automatic login) and it stops dead. It is NOT FROZEN because the mouse pointer still can be moved. Inserting a CD makes a little CD icon appear on the pointer. The first time I copied the partition from the Primary Master drive (before swapping the drives physically) to the Primary Slave drive, I got a boot menu with a choice of which one to boot from and it would boot and launch Windows just fine. Somehow the boot.ini on the original Primary Master drive got changed to include the two choices. the boot.ini on the other drive was NOT CHANGED from the original. When I swapped the drives, it'd just boot to the original Windows install- now on the Primary Slave drive. How it managed that when boot.ini on the Master drive had no pointer to the second drive, I have no idea! It continued to boot to the slave drive even after I edited the boot.ini on it to not have a pointer to the slave drive. With it still booting to the slave drive, I deleted the partition on the master drive and the rest as listed above. Before I did that I tried disconnecting the slave drive so it could not 'jump' to the wrong drive and got exactly the same situation it's in now. I wonder if anything useful would show up in the boot log? I should be able to get to that with ERD Commander. It's bugging me that for some reason Partition Magic hasn't done something right. It's ALWAYS worked perfectly before, when I've done this on someone else's PC! (Version 7 didn't because it didn't copy the volume ID and serial number, which would cause 2000 and XP to do the endless boot-loop.) I've even copied an XP Pro install from a drive with only one primary partition to a Dell B110's middle partition, nuking XP Home, and all I had to do to make it work was edit boot.ini to point to partition 2.

I had XP on a 32gig partition (with the rest of the drive as a 117 gig partition) and a 74 gig drive as primary slave. I used Partition Magic 8 to copy C: to the 74gig and resize it to fill the drive. Upon rebooting, it asked which windows install to boot and would boot either one. Next try, swap the drives' cable positions and master/slave settings- it SHOULD see the exact copy of the XP install on primary master and boot from it, right? No! It goes direct to partition 0 of the slave drive and boots right into XP without asking which install to boot. I made certain that the BIOS boot order is set to boot the 74gig drive 0 first. Back to Partition Magic. I set this sequence of actions. 1. Delete partition on primary master. 2. Copy partition 0 from primary slave to primary master. 3. Resize copied partition to fill the drive. 4. Hide partition 0 on primary slave. It does all that and now booting hangs at the screen with the small Windows XP logo and the mouse pointer, which can move. I suspect there's something boogerd with the swap file. I have ERD Commander 2005, which has a registry editor. Where in the registry can I change whatever gets changed when using the normal virtual memory settings from within Windows to disable the swap file? I'm hoping that it will then boot and I can delete pagefile.sys, re-enable the swap file the normal way then reboot and Windows will create a new pagefile.sys I'd like to avoid having to reinstall Windows, even though it's a fairly fresh install without much other stuff on it yet. (Might be an opportunity to finally try out the 64bit version on the AMD chip.)

What do I have to do (short of a 'nuke and pave') to make this stupid thing display fonts properly? I "upgraded" to IE7, figuring it's such a huge change it'd have to correct whatever was screwy with IE6's font problems. HA! IE7 is doing EXACTLY the same thing as IE6. 100% of everything on Wikipedia is in Arial Black and same for certain things on a few other sites.

I don't want to wipe the drive because I have other video files on there (that I hope are still OK) I want to keep and don't have enough room anywhere else to move. Unlocker saw nothing having a handle on them so I chose Delete and clicked OK to have them deleted on reboot. That didn't work. DelInvFile couldn't do a **** thing to the files. Same story for GiPo's move on boot. Can't do squat with it due to CRC error. WTF good is a filesystem that provides absolute protection to BAD files?! What it *should do* is when it finds a bad file that can't be fixed is offer to DELETE IT, no mercy, no quarter and with extreme prejudice. Does Vista share this STUPID 'feature'?

A couple days ago I had O&O Defrag set to defrag all four hard drives, reboot and do offline defrag of normally locked files then shutdown. Well during the night there was a power 'blip-out' that lasted just long enough to shut the PC down. It mangled something in XP Pro to where it not only wouldn't boot up, trying a repair install or even a clean install would hang right in the middle. I had to use ERD Commander to move what I wanted to keep then wipe C: then install Windows. THEN the other shoe dropped. Scandisk wants to check E:, the big 233gig drive. Says there's four damaged files and it'll fix them... and it just sits there forever doing nothing. Skip the boot time scan and try it from Windows, same thing. Next I figure I'll see what I can do without on there and start with a folder of large videos of a TV series. Attempting to delete the folder hangs the system for a long time then it pops up with a cyclic redundancy check error. (I don't want to PLAY them, I want them GONE! Don't give a bleepityBLEEP if they're corrupted!) Next step (after rebooting because XP's gone into frozen syrup mode), the Command Prompt. CD to the director and del *.* Takes a bit, it spits back 4 errors- at least the other files are gone. But now I'm quite literally stuck with four almost 400 megabyte each files that are damaged yet for some silly reason XP is protecting better than if it was a mother bald eagle guarding her eggs! Anyone have any idea why XP is determined that it can only delete *perfect* files? Am I going to have to resort to a partition table editor or something even deeper?

So can I just install this update or do I have to uninstall the previous edition then run this? I'm running 98SE2Me on a Toshiba Tecra 8000 PII 300Mhz laptop. I'tll randomly bluescreen when shutting down- always seems to be some different reason each time. Sometimes it shuts down just fine. Before applying 98SE2Me, I installed 98SE, IE6, DirectX 9.0c, and all the Toshiba drivers for the laptop and the Deskstation V+ doxking station. After 98SE2Me it can't tell if it's docked or not. I have to select the configuration manually at boot.

I know it's possible to force a full download of IE6 SP1 for all supported versions of Windows, same for IE 5.5. (I've done both.) How about IE6 SP2? I need to reinstall IE on a PC with XP SP2 because something has boogered the fonts in IE and only in IE. It's displaying almost everything in Arial Black. Curiously, MSFN.org looks fine while Wikipedia is 100% Arial black! Some sites only have some parts in Arial black. The problem is not the fonts because nothing else has this problem. I tried the full download I have of IE6 SP1 and it refuses to install because a newer version is already installed. Not even a Repair Install from a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD fixed the IE fonts problem. (Had to do that after that virus which kills AVG, Spybot and other apps sneaked onto it.) What I *think* caused the IE fonts problem was Adobe Font Manager. It appeared soon after that was installed, but uninstalling AFM didn't fix it. If there's no way to pull down a full install of IE6 SP2, is there a way to forcibly install IE6 SP1 then update to SP2? Better yet, is there a way to just fix the #$%@#%#$ fonts problem?

That's strange, I wonder why searching the Registry for Brother or the service name didn't find it there. It's deleted from there now. Will it be removed from the other places? Will companies ever produce an uninstall function that actually removes EVERYTHING the installer installed?

In my experience, deleting the uninstallers and any update installers Windows does keep will only make Windows Update want to download them again, even though they're already installed. CrapCleaner is freeware that can delete them and fix the registry so Windows Update won't download them again. It also does much more. Windows Update prior to 4.0 would keep ALL the installers and you could save a ton of time by just copying that folder full of them to any new install. Windows Update 4.0 would put them into wutemp then delete them after installing. Saving them before being deleted and putting them into the wutemp folder doesn't do squat for a new install. Windows Update 4.0 and later will ignore them and redownload all updates even if the files in wutemp are identical. If you really want to save time, the Autopatcher can still be found on Bittorrent and other P2P filesharing and mirror sites. The final update was August 2007, then Microsoft finally decided to be nasty and stop them. You should have XP SP2 or 2000 SP4 before using autopatcher, but it will install some updates on prior releases that're applicable to them.

I want something that'll fix screwed up fonts in IE6. I have various things on many sites displaying in Arial Black or Arial that should be some other font. Worst of all it displays 100% of Wikipedia in Arial Black. It's an IE6 problem because Netscape 8.1.2 and 7.2 and Firefox 2.0.0.6 show the correct fonts.

Are these in the last update to Autopatcher?

I used to have a Brother 5440cn multifunction printer/scanner/fax. It's 'uninstall' is typical, leaving files and registry keys behind. I think the final bit is BrSplService, the print spooler service it installed. (What? Windows own print spooler not good enough?) Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\Root\LEGACY_BROTHER_XP_SPL_SERVICE] "NextInstance"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\Root\LEGACY_BROTHER_XP_SPL_SERVICE000] "Service"="Brother XP spl Service" "Legacy"=dword:00000001 "ConfigFlags"=dword:00000020 "Class"="LegacyDriver" "ClassGUID"="{8ECC055D-047F-11D1-A537-0000F8753ED1}" "DeviceDesc"="BrSplService" This is also in ControlSet001 and ControlSet002 How do I get rid of them?

Now I remember I did one thing, installed Adobe Type Manager Deluxe. Uninstalling it didn't change a thing with IE6 and fonts. It's also using Arial Black in a few things on other sites, but only with Wikipedia does it render the entire site with that font.

Running XP Pro SP2 with all current updates. August 29th, 2007 and all is well. Surfed Wikipedia a bit, amongst other things. August 30th, 2007 and suddenly IE6 is displaying everything on Wikipedia and ONLY WIKIPEDIA in Arial Black. This does NOT happen with Firefox 2.0.0.6, Netscape 7.2 or Netscape 8.1.2. WTH happened and how do I fix it, or did someone screw up the IE6 fixes code at Wikipedia? (Look at the source for any Wikipedia page and you'll see a code block that detects IE5, IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7 to load the appropriate fixes sytlesheet.)

Driverguide has all the stuff for the 3300 series listed as "Tech Upload", which means you have to pay to download them. When Driverguide finally changed to requiring individual logins, they said new drivers uploaded would be only available to paying members for a short time, then would be released to everyone. Some of the HP 3300 stuff is still on "Tech Upload" that was uploaded there in 2004!

Will LiteStep work with 98SE2Me or would that be a bad thing to try? The 'full tilt' 98SE2Me setup and a 5,400 RPM 40gig hard drive put some fire (more like hot coals) in the old PII 300Mhz laptop, but it's still a sluggard at times. I'm currently saving my pennies for a newer lappy capable of running XP, but I'll likely keep the olde Tecra 8000 for 98SE experimenting.

Interesting... for the PhotoSmart 3300 series, the AiO_071_000_201_000_CDA_Default-Full_Network_AmericanEuro1.exe download from the 2000 and XP page has Win 9x drivers in it. I ran it on my Win9x laptop and let it self extract (took a couple hours on a PII 300 with 128M RAM) then copied the hp_webrelease folder and contents from windows\temp so it can be installed without having the big wait. 'Course they couldn't use something extractable with WinZIP or WinRAR. So at least for now, looks like some HP stuff that has a huge software download for 2000/XP may have the 9x/Me drivers in it as well. Makes it a bit of a pain to download though.

To use European convention... HP are arseholes, as are Microsoft, Intel and anyone else who does crap like this. Microsoft removed all information on their verra nice-a Office Keyboard and Strategic Commander from their site. Intel has lied for years in the info for their chipset software- claiming they support all the versions of Windows, but when you run the installer you find your version of Windows "already supports" that chipset. (And trying to find the final version of the package that actually contains drivers for your chipset/Windows combination is extremely difficult due to Intel using the same filename for years for all versions!) Driverguide.com are also arseholes. When they finally went to requiring individual logins, they also started this "Tech Upload" thing where new uploads would be restricted to paying members for a few months. Welllll, it ain't so! I was just there looking for 98 software for an HP Photosmart 3310 and ALL the software they have for it for ALL Windows versions is "Tech Upload", uploaded all the way back to 2004!

After doing a clean install of 98SE, drivers, IE6, 98SE2ME, 98MP10, the unofficial IE6 update- what's safe to install from Windows Update? Something I've run into on both IE6 and Firefox 2.0.0.6 on this laptop now is that most sites will not load until I hit stop then refresh.

That's set to C:\Windows\options\cabs Dunno how it got set to that. Can I do this? C:\Windows\options\cabs,C:\win98 Most likely won't stop it asking where the Windows install files are. I used to service and build PCs for a living and I'd always copy the win9x folder to the hard drive and change all instances of D:\win98 (or whatever letter the CD-ROM was during install) to C:\win98 and ALWAYS during driver installs I had to go back and forth several times telling Windows where the drivers were then where Windows' files were. The original Add New Hardware "Wizard" in 95 was the best version because the user could skip the id*** thing right to start with and point it to the drivers. With each new version of Windows users have been forced to endure more and more CRAP before finally getting to the point where the "Have Disk" button can be clicked. If the 3rd party sofrware world wants to do people a wonderful service, come up with a replacement for the Add New Hardware "Wizard" that forces Windows to skip all the "automatic" garbage. Yes, I do miss the days of "Jumper and STAY" resource settings. The hardware would work because it HAD TO- being locked down to what the jumpers were strapped to. Win95 would sometimes insist on assigning the wrong resources, but even then it could be hammerd into submission. Nowadays when Windows gets into its widdle mind that two devices are going to be assigned conflicting resources, there's little or nothing that can be done to convince it otherwise. *sigh* If only IBM hadn't been such 'tards on licensing the MCA bus and setup system.

AVG 7.x works great, has a DOS boot virus scan that runs first in 9x, every time you boot, doesn't take long. It's not a resource hog at all and it'll scan files when you click on them in Explorer. I've taken Norton Internet Security Suite off many PCs and replaced it with AVG and Spybot Search & Destroy. Norton is a huge resource hog. What's really annoying with it is to select anything in the left pane of Explorer you have to do three slow clicks because the first two times Norton's butting in to do something and de-selects it. AVG's operation is totally invisible until it finds a virus infected file.

The 98SE WDM driver for Yamaha OPL3-SAx audio doesn't work correctly with 98SE2ME. It'll install and appear in Device Manager and the audio devices list in the sound control panel, but not on the tabs where you select the Preferred Devices. The only thing that can then access the audio devices is DXDIAG in DirectX 9.0c. I had to go back to the VXD driver, which causes a constant low level noise in the speakers unless the volume is turned down and doesn't play nicely with hot swapping CardBus cards for some reason even though there are no conflicting resources. (The VXD driver worked fine in pure 98SE.) Would it be possible to rip the WinMe WDM drivers into an installer for use with 98SE2ME? I'm willing to test it on my Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop.

Bleah! I had to go back to the VXD drivers. The OPL3-SAx WDM entry vanished from the available devices in the sound control panel, even though it was still in Device Manager. DXDIAG could access the audio functions but nothing else could! Looks like the Win Me driver will need to be hacked for use with 98SE2ME.

I have a Toshiba Tecra 8000 with 98SE2ME. The Toshiba hibernate utility works perfectly with it. It's a two part thing, after installing the utility you boot to a safe mode command prompt and CD\halloc.tos then run halloc /c to create the toshiber.dat file in c:\ (If the RAM size is changed, the halloc.exe program must be run again to recreate toshiber.dat.) Reboot into Windows then click Hibernate on the Start Menu. The screen goes black then there's an animation of a laptop with the screen wiping over to a disk. Power is totally off and the laptop can be left that way indefinately. Poke the power button and the animation comes up- in reverse, in a few seconds you're right back where you were before. Hard drive speed is very important to how fast it hibernates and comes back. Mine took a long time with the original 4,200 RPM 6.4gig, but now with the 5,400 RPM 40gig drive it's really fast. The whole laptop is faster. It used to take over five minutes to boot, now this 300Mhz PII is ready to go in 1.75 minutes.

Got it working. Used the blowtorch labled "DirectX Runtime 9.0c".