Dave-H

OK, that's working! This is going from 512 to 4086 - Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600](c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.C:\WINDOWS\system32>I:I:\>switcherqev"DUAL" disk found as \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE4, connected as 4096 bytes/sectorThe NTFS Volume is Volume{e308684d-bc26-11e4-bfa7-00304879f908}Checking drive letters ...In use: C: D: E: F: G: H: I: S: W:Free : J: K: L: M: N: O: P: Q: R: T: U: V: X: Y: Z:Mounting volume to drive letter J: ... OK, done:Press any key to continue . . .Volume 7 J RAW Partition 931 GB HealthyFilesystem is RAW, we need to switch ...OK, switched:Next is the LABEL commandPress any key to continue . . .LABEL J:Data_4kbPress any key to continue . . .Volume 7 J Data_4kb NTFS Partition 931 GB HealthyEverything is cool ...Press any key to continue . . .I:\>This is going from 4096 to 512 - Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600](c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.C:\WINDOWS\system32>I:I:\>switcherqev"DUAL" disk found as \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE4, connected as 512 bytes/sectorThe NTFS Volume is Volume{e308684d-bc26-11e4-bfa7-00304879f908}Checking drive letters ...In use: C: D: E: F: G: H: I: S: W:Free : J: K: L: M: N: O: P: Q: R: T: U: V: X: Y: Z:Mounting volume to drive letter J: ... OK, done:Press any key to continue . . .Volume 7 J RAW Partition 931 GB HealthyFilesystem is RAW, we need to switch ...OK, switched:Next is the LABEL commandPress any key to continue . . .LABEL J:Data_512Press any key to continue . . .Volume 7 J Data_512 NTFS Partition 931 GB HealthyEverything is cool ...Press any key to continue . . .I:\>Again using elevated command prompts. The "you need to format the disk in drive J: before you can use it" window is still popping up when the script runs though, which is a bit off putting!

OK, this is what I got. Elevated command prompt attempting the switch from 512 to 4096. Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600](c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.C:\WINDOWS\system32>I:I:\>switcherqev"DUAL" disk found as \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE4, connected as 4096 bytes/sectorThe NTFS Volume is Volume{e308684d-bc26-11e4-bfa7-00304879f908}Checking drive letters ...In use: C: D: E: F: G: H: I: S: W:Free : J: K: L: M: N: O: P: Q: R: T: U: V: X: Y: Z:Mounting volume to drive letter J: ... OK, done:Press any key to continue . . .Volume 7 J RAW Partition 931 GB HealthyPress any key to continue . . .Press any key to continue . . .Press any key to continue . . .I:\>The "you need to format the disk in drive J: before you can use it" window pops up as soon as the first part of the batch prints.

@cdob Thanks, off topic but I actually fixed it using this brilliant tool SavePart. I had fallen into the hole of ending up with a new system drive that was being given the wrong drive letter, and SavePart fixed the registry of the new installation from the old one, which I thought was pretty cool! @jaclaz I tried the new switcher, and sorry to report that it again works perfectly in XP, but doesn't work at all in 8.1! I've tried running it every possible way in 8.1 (it works fine from a double click in XP) and it won't switch in either direction. It doesn't put up any error messages, but when it runs the "you need to format the drive" message from Windows keeps popping up, and when the batch ends, the switching hasn't been done.

Hi jaclaz. Sorry for the delay again, but I'm wrestling with another problem at the moment. I am trying to get my 98/XP system over to another drive, and it's been causing endless problems. I'm now stuck with a 98 system that say "invalid boot drive" when selected in the boot menu, and an XP installation that logs on and then immediately logs off again and endlessly loops this! Why do I think these things are going to be straightforward with computers? I never learn! Anyway, irrelevant to this forum, but I will have to wait until I can restore the hardware configuration to normal before I can test your new version, so please do bear with me!

Thanks guys, but I am pretty convinced now that it isn't a hardware problem, it only because I've substituted the card, and it made no difference, and also it all works perfectly on Windows XP and Windows 8.1. There are no relevant BIOS settings that I can see. The problem with going completely over to Nvidia cards, apart from the driver files clashing if I want to be able to use both cards on any of my operating systems, is that I also have an old Canopus DV video capture card, whose editing software uses hardware overlays to display the pictures. I have never had any success getting this to work with anything other than ATI cards, and even recent models of those don't support it. I had to put up without it when I had the single AGP Nvidia card fitted on the old motherboard, and it was very annoying not to have it, so I wouldn't want to go back to that, it would be only a very last resort! I might PM rloew now to see if he has any suggestions.

Sounds good, but I must say that I never thought that the diskpart delay was a problem. I only mentioned it at all because on my system at least there was an apparent pause in the script at one point which wasn't explained, which might lead impatient people to think that something had gone wrong! It's only 10 seconds at most though.

Yes, I remember AGP aperture settings being critical as well, but that was with my old motherboard. My present one isn't AGP, it's PCI, PCI-X, and PCIe. I certainly had the AGP version of the X850 working very happily with my old motherboard for several years, and the 256 MB of memory didn't seem to be a problem. I even for a while had an AGP Nvidia card installed on the old motherboard until the fan died, and that had 512 MB of memory! All made possible by the RAM limitation patch of course.

My "new" X800 card arrived today, and I put it in in place of the X850. It found the drivers and seemed to work fine, but it's still crashing exactly the same! I then did some more experimenting. I put the X850 back in, and removed the Nvidia card. Still crashing. I then moved the X850 into the 16x PCIe slot where the Nvidia card normally lives. Still crashing. So - 1/ It isn't a hardware fault in the card. 2/ The presence of the Nvidia card doesn't seem to affect things. 3/ It doesn't matter which PCIe slot it's plugged onto. I still suspect a memory issue. Not main RAM of course, some other low level memory issue that didn't happen with my previous motherboard, but does with this one. I am using the RAM limitation patch from @rloew, which may have an effect, but Windows 98 wouldn't work at all without it I suspect!

OK, I've been through it and here are my suggested changes. The changes are marked in red so you can see what I've altered, and because of that I've converted it to a Word document, which I hope you can read OK. ReadMe.doc

The only thing I saw immediately is that the readme still refers to "mkdualmode.cmd" in a number of places, which should be "mkdualdisk.cmd" of course!

Yes, that's good! It is strange that the pause is a lot longer going from 512 to 4096 than is is going the other way. Anyway, it doesn't matter, and the output does now tell you that there's going to be a pause, so that's fine.

Hmm, mine's nowhere near as quick as that! Running diskpart from the command prompt it goes to the diskpart prompt almost immediately. On running "rescan" there is about a four second pause before the next output appears, but only the first time it's run. If rescan is run again it's instant, the pause only re-appears if diskpart is closed and run again.

Yes, that's good, as the whole output now fits in the window without scrolling. There is a definite pause after "OK, written 4096 bytes at offset 0" before "Please wait while DiskPart scans your configuration..." comes up. It's about 10 seconds when going from 512 to 4096, and about 6 seconds when going from 4096 to 512. I've only tried in on XP as that's what I happen to be running at the moment.

The only place there seems to be a bit of an unexplained pause now is after "OK, written 4096 bytes at offset 0". Not really a problem though, it is quite short. I assume this is where DISKPART is being run. The shorter the output the better I agree.

The actual history is that I had a single AGP ATI X850 card on my old motherboard, and when I updated the motherboard to a PCIe one with no AGP of course I had to change my video card. I bought a cheap AMD card and that worked fine on XP (and later also on 8.1) but of course there were absolutely no drivers for Windows 98. After messing around with modified VGA drivers for 98, which gave me the resolution setting I wanted but with very slow screen refresh rates, i decided to try and find the PCIe version of my old X850. This I did, and I used that for a while, but I wasn't very happy with its performance, especially on 8.1 doing HD video editing. I then realised that it was possible to run two different cards in the two PCIe slots on my board, and as I wanted to keep the X850 for Windows 98, I went out and bought a cheap NVidia card, which I fitted in the 16x slot for best performance, and put the X850 in the remaining 4x slot. I didn't believe that it was possible to use two cards of the same brand with very differing ages, as they would surely use different driver files with the same name, which would inevitably cause a lot of problems to say the least! As it is, I can now use either card in Windows XP or 8.1, but only the X850 in Windows 98, as there are no 98 drivers for the NVidia card of course. The NVidia card has the standard MS VGA driver loaded in Windows 98, and is disabled. As I said earlier, the crashing on the X850 driver was I'm pretty sure occurring even when it was the only card fitted (in the 16x PCIe slot) so I don't think that the presence of the NVidia card has any bearing on the problem.

I think it would be good if it worked faster as a result, but as everything it does is essential I assume, it would take the same time to run even if it was less verbose, so is there any advantage? I would have thought that it's better if people can see that it's actually doing something, rather than having pauses with apparently nothing happening.

Hi again jaclaz. I've now checked with the other machine, and I'm pleased to report that the switcher operates correctly on it, and it now sees drive E: which is the network drive as being in use, and therefore ignores it.

Yes, I'll wait and see now what happens with the other card. Hopefully I will get it at the beginning of next week. If it's OK I think we'll have to assume that the first card just had a hardware problem. Incidentally, I meant to say in my last post that I'm pretty sure that it's not coming back with the standard VGA driver, as it still looks perfectly normal, in 1920x1080 with full colour depth. The square at the top left and the strange mouse cursors are the only sign that there's anything still wrong. I already have an NVidia card installed in the other PCIe slot, so I can't really add another one as there would surely be a clash of driver files on Windows XP and Windows 8.1, even if I had no NVidia drivers installed on Windows 98.

Running SVGACOM doesn't clear the display corruption I'm afraid. As you can see, the square of rubbish is still there in the top left corner. I have now decided that I need to eliminate the card itself being the source of the problem. Although it does work fine in Windows XP and Windows 8.1, I did read somewhere that they run hotter under Windows 98, and if the hardware is more stressed that could be the issue. I found another used card on eBay for a very cheap price, so I have ordered that. It's an X800 card rather than an X850, but I'm hoping it's close enough to just directly substitute it without any driver complications, as the driver is for both. That will hopefully eliminate whether it is actually a hardware issue.

OK, that has fixed it! The command window is closing again at the end though, instead of going back to the command prompt. One thing I have noticed is that Windows 8.1 seems to feel the need to scan drive I: quite often when it mounts. Why I'm not sure, as looking in the event log it never seems to actually find any problem! The scan is of course almost instantaneous anyway as it's such a small volume. The only other thing I must now try is to check that it all works OK on the other 4096 interface only machine, to make sure that there are still no complications caused by the network drive.

No, sadly your tool restores exactly the same garbled desktop. I'd certainly be using it if it didn't! I think once the "damage" has been done, the desktop cannot return to normal except by a reboot. When it's come back in the garbled state, whether it's restored by your tool, the ATI Control Panel, or by putting the machine to sleep and waking it again, it never looks right again, even though it is apparently back at its normal settings. The differences are the mouse cursor display (which may be a clue!) and the box of rubbish at the top left, which stays there, although proportionately larger, even if you go to DOS. Only a restart will clear it. That looks like some sort of corruption in the RAM of the graphics card.

Yes it does indeed, thanks Drugwash! Actually after I used it I realised that in fact the ATI Control Panel has a hot key function which will do exactly that same thing, so I'm actually now using that! Now when the display suddenly vanishes to I don't know what, I can just hit Ctrl+F12 and bring it back again, albeit with the square of digital rubbish in the top left hand corner, and a big blurry mouse cursor in a grey square box, as per my original screenshot! I've no found any way of returning it completely to normal apart from a reboot, but at least I can finish what I was doing easily now before rebooting. I'm still no nearer to finding out why it's doing what it's doing though. It would be a help to find exactly what triggers the problem! I have a program called Registry Workshop, which has a pop out menu that allows you to select favourite registry locations. Getting that to pop out and double clicking on any of the entries crashes the display pretty reliably! The other crashes seem to happen quite randomly after using Explorer for a while to move files around and that sort of thing. I've never managed to provoke a crash by using any other program (so far!)

OK, tried that, and what's happening with "run as an administrator" is this - Vista , or later, ...OK, I am a local admin ..."DUAL" disk found as \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE5Disk is connected as 4096 bytes/sector* Volume 9 J RAW Partition 931 GB Healthy'dsfo' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file.'dsfo' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file. Checkpoint#1Press any key to continue . . .

Sorry for the long delay in replying again. I did manage to get the Asus ICM driver to work in Windows 98 after a bit of a struggle, but it didn't affect the problem I'm afraid. I've been experimenting with other earlier driver versions, but all the ones I've been able to find either have the same problem, or don't contain any hardware IDs for the card. I've tried manually adding the necessary information to the INF files, but without success. Catalyst 4.3, and possibly 4.4, are supposedly the last "proper" Windows 98 ATI drivers, but the card post-dates them. Catalyst 5.2 is a driver for ME which does support the card, but also crashes. I'm now working on the principle that it isn't actually a problem with the driver itself. It does install fine and works fine until you try something taxing, at which point it decides to switch spontaneously to some other output standard, which unfortunately my monitor can't display! It passes all the DirectX tests with flying colours, so it can't be that unstable.

Yes, changing the elevate.exe switch from -c to -k does exactly what I wanted! The window now stays open when the batch ends. I've tried just double clicking on the switcher file and that all works fine, which is good as it means it can be run from a shortcut, but there is a problem with right clicking and selecting "run as administrator". The command prompt window comes up OK after the UAC prompt is dismissed, it says what interface the disk is connected with, but then just outputs some lines that are too fast to read, and closes! Needless to say it hasn't done the switch.