rloew

I seem to have found RFDISK on your website as part of the Terabyte plus package. Is there a way to buy it separately? It is available separately. It is listed in the Prerelease and Beta Section of the Software Catalog.

I have modified INF Files for SATA Cards that go with my SATA Patch. These can handle most PCI and PCI-E SATA Cards.

I have written a Boot Manager that can choose among multiple Partitions on a single Hard Drive to Boot. With this you can have all of your Operating Systems on one Hard Drive. It is installed by my Advanced Partitioning Program RFDISK. It can be setup so you can choose which OS you want to boot by pressing a key at startup. I currently have Windows 95, 98SE, ME, XP, 7 and 8 on my Primary Hard Drive.

Extracting the Updates themselves would be rather difficult and time consuming.A list of the applied updates is stored in the Registry. I don't know if there is a repository of these Updates.

So since I will only be using 2GB, would that mean that it should mostly work except for, as you said, these apps that have bugs with large amounts of RAM?I vaguely remember a DOS Extended Memory Application that choked over 2GiB because it used signed arithmetic.With 2 GiB of RAM this shouldn't be an issue as slightly less than 2GiB will actually be available.

Only Programs that use Extended Memory might have a problem.DOS itself mainly uses the low 640KB memory space. With HIMEM and EMM386, it can access more of the 1.06MiB Real Mode addressable space so it doesn't see a lot of RAM. Programs can page in and out all of 32-Bit RAM using HIMEM. Without adding an option to the HIMEM.SYS Command in CONFIG.SYS, you may have problems above 2.5GiB. It is also possible that a Program itself may have a bug when more memory is present than it was designed to handle.

OK, since you're running Win98SE on a modern PC, we have established that one can run Win98 on a current-model computer. That's very good to know. But to my mind the issue isn't the age of the computer itself, but rather the age of the OS relative to the newness of the peripherals and accessories. I was responding to Andrew T's quote (#25). This was specifically about the age of the Computer itself. Your response about peripherals is more related to the OP's original question about OS choices, not CPU choices. Unfortunately, these issues are real. Generic solutions are available for some things such as for USB and SATA.I do have 2-sided printing drivers for HP PCL printers that probably could be generalized, but I think even HP is going towards proprietary interfaces.

Wow, that is amazing! However... If and when the time comes to do a fresh install of Windows 98 -- where does one go to get all the official updates through July 2006? (I'm thinking of Win98 FE, not SE.) Are there any repositories elsewhere, now that Microsoft has killed/repurposed the one(s) that stored the Windows Updates for 9x that you used to be able to get by clicking on "Windows Update" on the Start Menu? I may have the 98FE Updates, but I primarily use 98SE so I have not looked at them.I repackaged the 98SE Updates into a more easily installed Pack I call SP0 to distinguish it from others SPs. This is not relevant to your post as you would have the same problem installing on an old Computer. External peripherals are also not relevant to your post as they are not dependent on the age of the Computer.Built in peripherals such as Video, Audio, and LAN are more problematical. You will often need to add a card. Hopefully you are satisfied.

Assuming someone likes Windows 9x or has a need for it, for any of the long list of reasons described elsewhere in this forum, there are several reasons.1. It will run faster. Faster is good until you get rug burn on your fingertips. 2. Older Computers break down and are becoming harder to replace. 3. Faster Peripherals such as Ethernet, USB and Video. 4. More RAM, bigger Hard Disks, more Cores. With a few Patches Windows 9x can handle them all. I have 32GiB of RAM, 8TiB of Hard Disk Space and 8 Cores at 3.1GHz. I'm not stopping here. Without further Mods, Windows 9x can support 1024GiB of RAM, 384TiB of Hard Disk Space and 16 Cores at 21GHz.

It is not necessary to use separate Hard Drives for each OS. There are various Multi-Boot options. I have solved these.

I found some small cards to run sata drives. One plugs into the 2nd IDE plug and has 2 sata connectors for master and slave drives, the 2nd type plugs onto the sata drives and makes them look like a IDE drive, IDE POWER, IDE FLAT CABLE CONNECTOR, IDE MASTER SLAVE JUMPER CONNECTOR.ANYONE USE EITHER OF THESE? EDIT Just found data on line that says 1st card that plugs into IDE connector and drives 2 sata that both need to be the same, 2 dvds or 2 hard drives or it does not work? Koutech IO-ASA221 Koutech IO-ASA120 Spend more, get less.Either of these options will tie up your IDE Ports, leaving them unavailable for other Drives, while leaving your SATA Ports unused.

Or get my Patch.

Does it hang or crash?If it crashes, what message is displayed? If it hangs, when does it hang? Does it run in Safe Mode?

Raid mode only works if you have a Raid Driver. My standard SATA Patch won't work if the Controller is in Raid Mode. I have an alternate Patch if Raid Mode is required.The Patch is installed either in DOS before Windows starts or in Safe Mode where no Drivers are used.

On your website it has(No AHCI Only SATA Controllers Present) My boards have old 40 pin ide and sata so what does that mean? AHCI SATA protocol is incompatable with Windows 9x. Some newer Motherboards use AHCI.If they only support AHCI than my Patch cannot be used. Since your Computer has IDE Ports, I doubt that it would be new enough to only support AHCI Protocol. If your BIOS supports LEGACY or NATIVE Mode for the SATA Drives, the Patch will work.

It is on my website.

Try replacing the MSDOS.SYS file in the Boot portion of the CD image with a File containing just a Semicolon and a CRLF.

I doubt that you will find a BIOS update for SATA. Few BIOSes support Legacy Mode SATA.I have a Patch for Windows 98 that supports the Native Mode SATA most BIOSes do support.

GetFileSize already returns the full size so GetFileSizeEx should also.If I implement it with DLLHOOK, I would pass the results through unmodified. You cannot get, set, or move a File pointer beyond 4GiB-1 from Windows 9x through a Network.

Probably. Just needs a safety check for results that overcome the max FAT32 size that could be read through network from a NTFS partition. I'm not sure how the plug-in, OS, etc would react when such large result is returned, under Win9x.Is there any more activity in the KernelEx department? Haven't seen any update at Leyok's repository in quite some time. Is there any other attempt known? Reading a File Size under Windows 9x from a NTFS Partition through a Network shows the true size, but there is no way to access more than 4GiB even with my Large File Emulator to receive the data. I would assume that any program that uses GetFileSizeEx would be able to deal with reported sizes above 4GiB, although they may not realize that they cannot be fully accessed.

Never said it was an everyday occurrence.

Can you provide any detail/reference/whatever about this behaviour?Are you talking of the "mistery bytes"? http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/mystery.htm From the above this can happen only if all six bytes at 0DAh-0DBh are 00's on the "non-standard MBR". jaclaz Yes. But they are no mystery to me.I already had an Amiga SCSI Hard Drive disabled by this, simply by trying to read the Disk with an Adaptec Card. It has far less data in Sector 0, so these addresses were unused. The problem is that the entire Sector is Checksummed.

Thanks , but I need it not.Luck (if needed) is for the future. What I was talking about was experience (past). If you prefer I had in the past enough luck already to be able - with the exception of a few disk drive hardware failures (and even in those cases without actual data loss as I had valid backups) never lost (apparently) not even a single byte of data in any accident connected with LBA28, LBA48 or their good or bad/defective implementation in any BIOS of any machine I happened to own (or use or repair/set up). Everything can happen (always) but after some 20 years playing with PC's, when something never happens I feel authorized to say that it is a bit unlikely (as said if some common sense is used). In my simplicity I believe that anyone running today obsolete software (no offence whatever intended to the good Win9x/Me lovers) on obsolete hardware (and again no offence whatever intended for those peeps that - BTW like myself - have fun in using/re-using such things) should be aware (or made so) of the possible issues/limits and of the possible solutions/workarounds but - with all due respect - your posts about these issues sound a tidbit "catastrophical" to me. jaclaz It sounds like you are fairly quick in moving to newer hardware and software for your critical systems. This would significantly reduce your window of vulnerability. By the time there were a significant number of LBA48 Hard Drivesbig enough to justify using them, LBA48 BIOSes were available. Even with the vulnerability, the risk is relatively low, but the corruption, especially when caused by the BIOS, IS catastrophic. Backups won't work if you haven't had a chance to make them, or if you have unknowingly corrupted files and backed them up to all of your backup media.

I have a Tyan S1590 manufactured in 1998. It supports 384MB of RAM, enough for later OSes. I Patched the BIOS to provide LBA48 support. I have seen Motherboards as late as 2003 with faulty LBA48 support. I'm sure they can handle XP. I repeat, good luck to you.

If you apply these fixes, you stand a greater chance of having two Disks with the same checksum, especially if you do raw copies of the Disks. The same thing applies to Hard Drives if the second fix is applied. Duplicate Volumes will be melded into one and can crash if they are removed. Duplicate Hard Disk MBR checksums can lead to the Disks being swapped, resulting in possible corruption. This can also occur using the other alternatives described previously or if a Disk is Write Protected. It is important when copying Disks or Partitions that you ensure they have unique Checksums. Some tools do this automatically, others don't. I have added checks and fixes to my Copying, Partitioning and Formatting tools for this.