Dave-H

Thanks jaclaz. It's a Western Digital WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0 drive. That all looks very complicated, but might indeed be the explanation as to why it's a problem now that it wasn't before, as my previous drive was a few years old and therefore almost certainly wouldn't have been "advanced format". Do you think I should try doing the format with a different allocation unit size. I had been using the default, which appears to be 4096.

Thanks as always jaclaz! I downloaded and used Dimio's HDHacker. (Incidentally I've been using his DTaskManager for years now on XP, it's great!) I hope it got the data you need, which is attached. Both sets of data seemed to be a lot smaller on the eSATA formatted drive than on the USB formatted drive, which seemed odd. The drive is drive 1 on the netbook (USB), and drive 5 on the main machine (eSATA). All done in Windows 8.1 pro with a full capacity primary partition created. Cheers, Dave. DriveData.zip

Happy New Year everybody! Just reporting back in to say that my eSATA PCI card arrived a bit earlier than I expected, and I've now removed the plug-in Ethernet card and replaced it with the new card. Amazingly, it actually has Windows 98 drivers! http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173268-esata-card-drivers-for-windows-98/ I also re-enabled the second on-board Ethernet controller. No real problems, the readout on the startup of Windows 98 looks exactly the same as before, which confirms that the Windows 98 system was seeing the second on-board card even while it was supposedly disabled using a hardware jumper. I don't actually need the second on-board card working in Windows 98 so I haven't looked into trying to get it working alongside the first one. I'm just grateful that we got the first one working!

I have an external 1TB SATA drive in an enclosure, which has two connection interfaces, eSATA and USB. I am trying to get it working as a backup drive for my two Windows 8.1 Pro computers. Only one computer has an eSATA interface, which works fine and can see the drive no problem. The other computer, a netbook, can only connect to the drive via USB, which also works fine. The problem is that I can create a full sized primary partition on the drive which can be seen by both machines using the different interfaces, but when I NTFS format the partition on one machine, the other machine doesn't see it as formatted. If I then format it again on the second machine, the first machine no longer sees it as formatted! Anyone any idea why this should be, surely the type of interface shouldn't make any difference to the way the drive itself is seen? I've also tried using Windows XP (which is also on both machines) to create a logical drive within an extended partition instead of a primary partition (Windows 8.1 doesn't seem to offer this option) but with the same result. The annoying thing is that I'm sure I did have this working with a previous 1TB drive in the same enclosure, which I had to replace as it went faulty. Now try as I might I can't get it to work. Any suggestions gratefully received.

I'm used to information on websites being wrong, especially on auction sites, but having the wrong information actually printed on the product box, and on the documentation inside, as it is on the ST400 I bought, is right out of order! Anyway, I'm pleased to report that the 1.3.67 driver seems to work perfectly on the ST300, so assuming that is the last Windows 98 compatible driver, that's the one to add to the collection!

Thanks guys, sorry I've been otherwise engaged this evening, but I will try the 1.3.67.0 driver tomorrow and report back.

That is actually a later driver for Windows 98 than the one I've got on disk, good find! The one I've got is 1.3.61.0, that one is 1.3.65.2. I can't try it with the ST300 at the moment, but I bet it will work!

Unfortunately the drivers on Vantec's website for the ST300 are the same, no Windows 98 driver included, despite what the page says! The only Windows 98 driver seems to be the one on the installation CD that came with my ST300 card. I guess that might well work with the ST400 as well.

Thanks Drugwash. The Vantec UGT-ST300 eSATA card I just installed is the PCI version of the previous one I had, a Vantec UGT-ST400, which appears to be the PCI Express version of the same card. I never got the ST400 to work, as the motherboard refused to recognise it in a PCI Express slot, which is why I fell back on the PCI version. Both versions claim to have drivers for Windows 98, the ST400 ones being a bit later (from 2007 instead of 2005). Now I've looked into the driver situation more closely, it appears that the ST300 is the only card that actually has Windows 98 drivers. Despite the fact that the ST400 box and installation booklet clearly state that it supports Windows 98, there are no Windows 98 drivers on the disk in the box! Also the latest ST400 driver available from Vantec's website is the same as that on the ST400 disk, so no Windows 98 there either even though the page says that the card supports it! Anyway, I've got one that works, although had the ST400 worked with the motherboard I would have been highly miffed to find that there weren't actually any Windows 98 drivers for it despite what the documentation says! I'm sure I can get the necessary files off the installation disk if you think they would be worth having. I'm still getting odd niggles with Windows 98, sometimes it tries to load on the splash screen, and then the system just spontaneously re-boots, or occasionally the system just freezes. Usually telling it to load normally again then works. I'm also getting BSODs when inserting CDs into the CD drive, which is annoying. If I then reboot with the disk already in the drive it seems to be fine. I guess these sorts of things are par for the course when you're using Windows 98 on a system that fundamentally wasn't designed for it, and I think I've actually been very lucky to have got it working so well at all! The main niggle still outstanding is the graphics driver crashing sometimes, but that's definitely for another thread! Cheers, Dave.

Happy New Year everybody! Just wanted to report that I've just fitted a Vantec UGT-ST300 eSATA PCI card to my system, which I had been very pleased to find actually has Windows 98 drivers. It works perfectly, so would be a solution to add SATA/eSATA to an older motherboard with Windows 98. It has one eSATA port and one internal SATA port. It's obviously not a current card, but there did seem to be several sources of it on eBay.

I'd be very surprised if you couldn't find some 1GB sticks of the right type on eBay. There are many recycling firms that sell such bits of old hardware, I've had several old pieces of kit from them for my system.

Hear hear! I've never regretted buying the RAM Limitation Patch. It not only allowed Windows 98 to cope with huge amounts of memory, but made it an enormous amount more stable too. I can almost count the number of BSODs I've had since installing it on the fingers of one hand, far better than it ever was before.

I'd already tried that as a test a while ago when I was still trying to get the DOS driver working. I pulled out the plugin Ethernet card, and it still saw two adapters!

I have ordered another (eSATA) PCI card to replace my now redundant plugin Ethernet card, but it won't arrive until the first week of January, and I don't really want to open up the machine and start experimenting again until I can do all that in one go. I hope that enabling the second on-board Ethernet adapter won't cause any problems, as I'd quite like to use that for a direct connection to my netbook for transferring files. As I said, the second adapter is disabled at the moment by a hardware jumper on the motherboard, so I am a bit surprised that the DOS driver is apparently seeing it at all!

Thanks, I looked at that document a while ago, and it was very useful to see detail about the PROTOCOL.INI options. The only one I ended up using was specifying the slot. I am assuming that when and if I enable the second onboard adapter, this will not be affected, in fact it seems to be seeing both of them anyway despite the fact that one of them is disabled with a hardware jumper at the moment! Goodness, I'll have a look at all that when I've got time! Ah, the old Windows 98 Resource Kit! I've got a copy, but haven't had to look at it for ages. I didn't think to look and see if there's anything about Windows networking with a DOS adapter driver, but I'm glad to say that it doesn't matter now anyway!

There is one entry in the registry here - I doubt if installing the MS DOS Network Client would have had any effect, as I completely removed it and deleted all its folders and startup file entries before trying again with the Windows setup.

Yes, it is very annoying, especially as the thread potentially won't be as much help to others as it might have been if we don't know exactly what the fix was! I'll be interested to hear what Sfor thinks. It may well be that I misunderstood his instructions and just didn't do things in exactly the right order or something. Looking at my present PROTOCOL.INI file, the difference is here - [data]version=v4.10.2222netcards=E1000$,*PNP8fffEverything else is the same, but that *PNP8fff which wasn't there before is the magic extra. A file has been added to my INF\OTHER folder too, whose contents look like an INF file, but is called ~OEM0B01.WIN. That's not something I'd ever seen before either! And yes den, I'm looking forward to taking the separate Ethernet card out later today, it will eventually be replaced with an eSATA card!

Thanks buyerninety. I just replied to your PM, then found you'd deleted it! As I see you've seen, the problem has gone away anyway as I finally got the driver to work in Windows! I had been working on the DOS memory issue by PM with dencorso, and I think we'd got to the point where we were about to decide that there was just no way to free enough base memory to allow the MS DOS Networking components and the Arachne DOS browser to run at the same time. Apparently most modern motherboards have this problem, because they're just not designed for DOS working of course. Cheers, Dave.

Hi again guys, sorry for the delay, but I've been trying, with dencorso's invaluable help, to free enough base memory to run the MS DOS networking and the Arachne browser at the same time, to test the DOS network driver. We weren't having a lot of success because of the architecture of my motherboard, and were on the point of giving up (at least I was!) Then, I decided to have another go in Windows. After several fruitless attempts which just produced the same results as before, suddenly and completely unexpectedly IT WORKED!! In the best traditions of this sort of thing, I can't exactly say why it's now working when it wouldn't before, but what I think I did differently was this. I removed the Ndis2 and Gigabit adapters from Device Manager, and then tried installing the Ndis2 adapter again. However, this time after the file copying, I didn't immediately reboot as instructed (which had always just resulted in a "cannot load drivers" entry.) This time I tried updating the driver first, and pointed it at the INF file for the Intel DOS driver. This had always said "no information about your hardware" when I'd tried anything similar before, but to my great surprise this time it said it had a driver for the Gigabit Adapter, and started to install. It actually asked for the location of E1000.DOS file, which it had never done before, so I was highly hopeful. After it had finished, I rebooted, and was rewarded with an enabled Intel Gigabit Network Adapter entry in Device Manager, using NDIS.VXD as its driver. Tested the internet connection, and was over the moon to find it was working! The driver details in Device Manager were a bit bizarre, the driver provider string was gibberish, and the driver date was 0-0-1980! A bit of registry editing soon fixed that though. Testing it, it's just as fast as its predecessor, so I am well pleased and I can't thank you all enough for all your help with this! I certainly hope this thread is of help to others in the future. My next problem is why my graphics driver keeps crashing in Windows 98 unless I keep it on 256 colours, but that's for another thread! Cheers and thanks again to you all, Dave.

Well I tried Memmaker again, just using my normal AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, without any of the Arachne or MS Network Client entries. Sadly I got the same result as before, the system won't restart after the optimisations, it just stops on the Windows 98 splash screen, or on a flashing cursor on black if I boot to the command prompt. This is the CONFIG.SYS it's trying to use - DEVICE=C:\WIN-98\CHKSTATE.SYS /S:SR3 /15834DEVICE=C:\WIN-98\HIMEM.SYSDEVICE=C:\WIN-98\EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=CF00-D0FFBUFFERS=12,0FILES=30DOS=UMBLASTDRIVE=ZFCBS=4,0REM 29/11/2014SHELL=C:\WIN-98\COMMAND.COM /E:768 /PREM ** REM OUT THE PREVIOUS LINE WHEN USING AUTO-PATCHER **DEVICE=C:\WIN-98\SIZER.EXE /15834 /11 C:\WIN-98\COMMAND\ANSI.SYSCOUNTRY=044,850,C:\WIN-98\COMMAND\COUNTRY.SYSDOS=HIGHREM DEVICE=C:\PROGRAMF\OLDPROGR\CREATIVE\CDROM\DRV\SBIDE.SYS /D:MSCD001 /P:170,15REM ** REINSTATE THE PREVIOUS LINE IF CD SUPPORT IS NEEDED IN DOS OR SAFE MODE **I tried a step by step boot, and it's fine until it gets to DEVICE=C:\WIN-98\SIZER.EXE /15834 /11 C:\WIN-98\COMMAND\ANSI.SYS at which point it stops and goes no further. Trying again and skipping that line it's then OK until it tries to load DBLBUFF.SYS with SIZER.EXE (which isn't actually in the CONFIG.SYS file, which i think is normal) and it hangs again. Skipping that it gets to loading AUTOEXEC.BAT and then hangs again. I don't know what's wrong, but I guess I'm going to have to try and set it all up manually, as Memmaker's automatic settings are just not working.

LOL, I remember those days too, although I suspect you go back with PCs much further than I do (1993). I did actually run memmaker for the first time in years a while ago to try and sort out some other problem, and after it had finished the system wouldn't restart so I had to undo it, but I will try again.

I tried installing Arachne, which went fine, although the installer complained about being out of conventional DOS memory. It didn't find anything to allow it to connect, so i downloaded and installed Microsoft Network Client 3.0 for DOS. That installed fine and found the Intel DOS driver without any problem. The trouble now is that I can't use that and Arachne at the same time because there isn't enough memory! I haven't even got himem.sys loaded in config.sys because I haven't needed it for years, but I guess I'll have to get my head around all that again if I'm going to get Arachne working.

Thanks jaclaz. A DOS web browser is not something I even knew even existed, letalone that it was still being worked on only last year! I'll let you know how i get on with it!

Thanks again submix8c. Sorry to appear so lazy as to not have just Googled for the information (other search engines are available) but I just thought that someone here would be bound to know all about it just off the top of their head! From that article it looks as if it doesn't make a lot of difference which logon option you use, although it's strange that it says that "Specifying Microsoft Family Logon as the primary network logon (in Control Panel > Network) makes the system display a menu of know (sic) user names at boot time." I've been using "Microsoft Family Logon" for years, and never seen a list of users pop up, which is why I use it, but I guess that's because I'm the only registered user on the system. I've now gone back to Microsoft Family Logon, and I've still been trying to find out why I can't get online using the DOS driver. I have now specified the slot being used in PROTOCOL.INI, which has cleaned up the startup dialogue, but it made no difference. I suppose what I should test fundamentally is whether the DOS driver is actually working in DOS. I have no DOS programs that use internet access, so has anyone got any suggestion as to how I can test it in DOS? Cheers, Dave.

Thanks LoneCrusader, that's good to know! Off topic (but perhaps not that much, who knows) but which is the best primary logon to use in Windows 98? As I said, I've been using "Microsoft Family Logon" for many many years, but are there any advantages (or disadvantages) to using any of the others? Cheers, Dave.