Dave-H

This is my boot.ini. No PAE switch. [boot loader]timeout=5default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WIN-NT[operating systems]multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WIN-NT="Windows XP Professional SP3" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOutC:\Cmdcons\Bootsect.dat="Windows XP Recovery Console" /cmdconsC:\="Windows 98 Second Edition"The 16 bit programs just don't run. There's usually no error messages, but I have occasionally seen "NTVDM has encountered an error and needs to close", which is obviously part of it. Looking at Task Manager when I start one of the programs, NTVDM runs but immediately closes again. I've now sorted out the physical problem of fitting my drives into the case with the new motherboard BTW!

I found a driver for the Ethernet card that works in Windows 98, so I can get online with both operating systems. I suspect that even if I can get it working, I would have trouble finding a 98 driver for the on-board GLAN, so I may well have to keep the card anyway. My main puzzlement now is why none of my old 16 bit programs will now work in Windows XP. They are working fine still in Windows 98. I've done some research on this, and there does seem to be a known problem with 16 bit programs on 64 bit operating systems, but of course my Windows XP is 32 bit, even though it's now running on 64 bit hardware. I can't find any references yet about problems with 16 bit programs on a 32 bit OS on 64 bit hardware. Anyone any information on this, and whether there's any answer to it?

Thanks Den, I've actually already got a separate PCI LAN Ethernet card, which is the one given to my by the guy I bought the board from. I'm using it to connect right now of course! If I can find a Windows 98 driver for it, I can of course carry on using it, but I'd still like to get the on-board LAN hardware working if possible, if only because it's annoying to have to use up a PCI slot with a card that shouldn't be necessary.

Hi again guys, sorry for delay in reporting back. The first thing I have to report, which I never thought I would be able to, is that Windows 98SE still works! I finally plucked up the courage to run it today, and was amazed when it started up at all. It spent ages finding and loading drivers, but after that it was fine, albeit in VGA mode because it has no driver for the new graphics card I had to buy. Sound is fine (it's the same AC97 system as the old board) and the only things it didn't find drivers for (as I expected) were the Ethernet controllers and a couple of system devices. So that's a real bonus, I really didn't think it would start up at all with the new hardware. Still not having any luck with the Ethernet controllers on Windows XP. I've tried several combinations of INF files and driver files from the two drivers I've got, and the only one that doesn't produce a "can't start" error is the Asus one, which again seems to be working fine, but won't connect to my router. I tried connecting it directly to the Ethernet port on my netbook too, but with the same result that it couldn't assign an IP address. I tried assigning all the correct numbers manually, and it then reported that it was connected, but the port light on the router was still red, and there was no actual connection. Also, even if I set the Ethernet port to force a 100Mbs connection, it's still reporting a 1000Mbs connection. As the router hardware presumably doesn't support connecting at that speed, I guess that could well be the problem! It's a Sagemcom F@ST2504n router BTW.

Thanks guys! I'm actually away from home for most of today, but I'll certainly follow all this up as soon as I can. I did get a reply from Supermicro, and they can't understand what's wrong! They gave me some driver links, but none of them recognised the hardware either.

@cdob The later Intel driver I tried didn't work either, so i tried the INF file mods on the Intel 18.3 driver you suggested, but unfortunately neither option worked. The driver apparently installs, but the device says "This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1)" in Device Manager. I think I will put the other driver back, which does say it's working properly in Device Manager, and see if i can find why it's not connecting to my router. @jaclaz The reason I didn't detail or link to the driver that apparently works is because it isn't actually working properly, so I saw no point unless I could declare that it was the right driver for the job! For what it's worth, it's here.

Thanks cdob! I have in fact now found a driver that does work with the GLANs, and they're now installed fine, as two "Intel PRO/1000 EB Network Connections", which I hope means that there's no hardware fault, but I still can't connect to the internet with either of them, it tries but then says it can't allocate an IP address. The driver you found is one of the ones I tried, but as you say it doesn't support this hardware as it is. I have e-mailed Supermicro to ask them about this, as it's very strange that there seems to be no software on their driver disk to support this hardware! Both GLANs have the same hardware ID BTW. I've found a later version of the driver I'm already using, which I will try, but if that doesn't work either I'll try hacking the driver as you outline above to see if that produces any joy.

The previous guy who owned the board presumably disabled the GLANs, to stop constantly being nagged for drivers. It seems a bit strange that they should both still be seen by the system and appear in Device Manager if they are physically faulty. I think I will e-mail Supermicro about this and see what they say. Everything else is pretty good, the system is running very fast and well. I am getting an annoying long constant beep from the system when it boots up, which goes away when Windows loads. Occasionally it does come back when I do some things, for instance yesterday it was beeping whenever I used the left arrow key to jog backwards on a video, but I haven't identified a common cause as yet. There's no sign of any hardware distress anyway. One thing that's puzzling me that I haven't researched on yet, is that I have two old (make that ancient) 16 bit programs that I still use. One is a desktop clock, and the other a desktop program running utility. Neither will now work, if i try and run them there's no error messages or anything, but they just don't run. 16 bit compatibility hasn't gone with this system surely!

Hi guys, well it worked (mostly)! The main problem I've run into is actually a physical one, not software related at all. The processors and their heat sinks are in a completely different place on the new board to the old one, and the metal expansion frame that contained my SCSI drives will now not go back into the case because they're in the way! At the moment the drives are sitting in their frame outside the computer while i wonder what to do about that! Software wise, everything went very well. The motherboard BIOS is 2.1a, which is the latest version, and the BIOS is reporting two quad core Xeons running at 3.16 GHz, which is all as it should be, and 4 GB of RAM. So, the hardware is all working, I think! I probably didn't mention this before, but I was a bit puzzled why the guy in Germany I bought the board from included a PCI Ethernet card in with it. I asked him why, because the board has its own Ethernet connections of course, two of them in fact. He came back to say that he had trouble with the on-board controllers, so had thrown in the card. I found the on-board controllers' jumpers were set to disabled, so thought that might be the problem, but when enabled, they are recognised by the system, but absolutely refuse to accept any drivers! It's supposed to be an Intel 82563EB controller, but no matter what driver I try, when I try to update the driver it says there is no compatible driver found. I eventually got online by using the PCI card, but I don't want to stay like that ideally as it's using up a precious expansion slot. I can't believe that both GLANs are physically faulty, although they could share some hardware of course. They are both being seen in Device Manager, the ID is PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1081&SUBSYS_00008086&REV_01\6&1185AD87&0&00100018, which produces no results on Google. All a bit of a mystery. Even the drivers on the Supermicro disk don't work, the Intel network software installs OK, but there is then no working network connection! I haven't dared try running Windows 98 yet, I fully expecting that it won't start at all..........

Thanks. I will try the new board tomorrow probably. If my next post is from my netbook, you'll know it was a disaster!

Thanks Den, I'll probably give that a try tomorrow. I'll see what the BIOS version is, and what it recognises as regards processors and memory. Supermicro say that you should never update your motherboard BIOS unless you are actually having problems, so if I find the version on my board isn't the latest version, do you think I should update it anyway? The latest version posted will almost certainly also be the last version, as it is a seven year old board.

Don't worry, the clone disk is safely shut away in a drawer! My present board goes through the memory checks and detecting devices, including the SCSI card's BIOS, and then searches all the drives listed in the boot devices, in the order they are listed (which you an change of course) and if it can't boot from any of them, displays "operating system not found". If no drives were connected, HDDs or CDs, the only thing in the list would be "bootable add-in cards" which I've never used. I have already fitted the quad core processors to the board, with the thermal coupling compound and heat sinks of course, so I don't really want to put the old ones back in again! Supermicro said that looking at the serial number of my board, it was made well after the 1.1 update revision was done to support quad core processors, so it's extremely unlikely that the BIOS on it won't support them. Presumably even if it didn't, no permanent harm would be done, it just wouldn't work, so it that were the case I would try updating the BIOS and/or putting back the original dual cores. I don't know what BIOS version is actually fitted, the chip has 7DAL C056 on it, but I don't think that relates to the version at all as the latest BIOS on Supermicro's site is quoted as 2.1c. I guess i won't know until I fire it up!

Everything is going well so far. I made a new clone disk this morning, and then immediately removed it. Later on I opened up the machine and disconnected the SCSI cable from the board to the system disks, and replaced the clone in the IDE bay and set the BIOS to boot from it. Everything worked as I hoped, the drives on the IDE disk became C: and D: and both Windows XP and Windows 98SE booted fine. They both booted very slowly, and were not performing anywhere near as fast as they usually do even after they were fully booted. Don't know why that would be, there is no problem with the performance of the disk, but at least they worked! So, I'm now confident that I have a "snapshot" of my system that I can now boot from if the original installation on the SCSI disk gets corrupted. Presumably in that scenario I can boot from the IDE disk and then clone it back to the SCSI disk after deleting the partitions on it to stop them being used. So what next, am I now ready to actually try the new hardware? I should emphasise that I don't even know for certain that the new motherboard will actually work at all! Both it, and the processors and memory are all "used" items, so there is no guarantee.

That's pretty much what I was intending to do anyway, but without re-cloning the disk first. As it does seem possible that it may have become damaged by being used alongside the original disk, I will now certainly do that! Why would I need to remove the SCSI controller card, won't just removing the physical connection to the SCSI disks be enough? EDIT: Just to add that I've now deleted the partitions on the IDE disk, I thought it safest to do that rather than just let CloneDisk overwrite the previous clone. I'll do the actual cloning tomorrow morning now as it takes ages!

Oh dear, all rather worrying! I'm glad to say that after returning the system to normal it still all seems to be working fine, in XP and 98, so I don't think any irrevocable damage has been done to the original installation. If anything was changed on the SCSI disk, it seems to have recovered OK. Whether the clone disk I made is still any good as a system backup remains to be seen of course. I'll take the system apart later, and disconnect the SCSI system disk, put the clone disk into the IDE cradle, and see if the system will still boot from it. If it won't work (and it may never have worked without the C: and D: drives still there of course) then I hopefully won't have actually lost anything, I'll just put the SCSI disk back and scratch my (and your) head again!

I've now used the "clone" option on CloneDisk to copy my SCSI system disk (C: and D: drives) across to the removable IDE disk. It took ages but said it had completed and the disk then said it wasn't formatted in Windows XP Explorer. I then tried changing the BIOS settings and booting from the IDE disk. It booted fine (although rather slowly) to XP, and I then found that the IDE disk now had a copy of the original C: drive, (now labelled F:), and a copy of the D: drive, (now labelled I:) on it. (There is already an E: drive BTW which is a separate SCSI data disk which didn't change.) Checking with Disk Manager reported that F: was indeed now the system drive, and I: was the boot drive. C: and D: were still there as well of course. Presumably that's why it was happy, because all the references to drive C: and drive D: in the system were still OK, as those drives still existed. I assume that the only way I can test whether the IDE disk is now a viable full system backup is to disconnect the SCSI system disk completely. What I hope would happen then is that the drives on the IDE disk would be configured as C: and D: and everything will still work just using the new disk. That means taking the machine apart though, so I'll try that later! Windows 98SE also booted OK BTW and it did seem to be using the IDE disk as the C: drive, which was good. So, have I wasted my time here or is this something that has a chance of working?!

Thanks again jaclaz. I did realise that I wouldn't be making a real clone as I said, as I know that's not possible unless the source and destination disks are physically identical, which isn't possible in this case. CloneDisk has the option in its "Clone" menu to make a clone or an image, so which is better for my purposes? If CloneDisk produces a single image file, the disk I'm intending to use as the destination would as you say have to be reformatted as NTFS as the image file even compressed would be much bigger than 4GB, but that obviously isn't a problem. If I select "clone" on the CloneDisk menu, it can't actually make a real clone for the reason stated. What will it actually do, will it still produce replicas of my C: and D: partitions on the new drive? It that's the case that should be more useful than an image file, as presumably I could then boot from that copy and have my old system back if the worst came to the worst, just on a different physical disk, which I can then sort out later. That presumably also wouldn't involve NTFS reformatting, which I don't want to do unless I have to as I don't want to possibly end up with the only copies of my Windows 98 system files on an NTFS drive.

Thanks again all. CloneDisk looks pretty straightforward, and it looks as if I can use that to make a clone of the whole system disk, which contains the C: and D: partitions. I have a 150GB FAT32 formatted plug-in IDE disk, which is at the moment only being used to back up some video files that are also backed up elsewhere, so I could use that as the destination. It won't be a real clone of course as the source and destination disks are a different size and type. Would I need to delete all the video files from it first? The CloneDisk documentation doesn't say what happens to any existing files on the destination drive. Presumably if the disk is re-partitioned (it's a single logical drive in an extended partition at the moment) it will all get zapped anyway. My "new" quad core processors arrived today, I've fitted them to the motherboard and also fitted the 4GB of memory that came with it. So, once the preparation is done, I'm now ready to physically swap the boards!

Ah, thanks yet again jaclaz! I wondered what cdob meant by its "real" name! I didn't realise that it got renamed. It is indeed originally halmacpi.dll, version 5.1.2600.5512.

Thanks again @jaclaz, that's given me a lot more confidence! I rather lazily only looked at the TechNet documentation for PE, which made it look quite frightening. MistyPE looks straightforward to use, I will investigate using it. You're quite right I really must make an image of the system disk, which contains the C: (Windows 98SE) and D: (Windows XP) drives. Just to complicate things even further, the XP Program Files and Documents & Settings folders are on C:, not on D:! I may need to go out and buy another IDE drive to do this though, as I don't have a spare one large enough. Thanks @cdob too, it's heartening that you think it will be straightforward! My present system is recorded as an ACPI Multiprocessor PC in Device Manager, as expected, but it says it's using hal.dll, whereas the MS article seems to be saying that it should be using halmacpi.dll. That file exists on the system, but only in the Service Pack files folder, so it isn't actually being used by the system. Any idea why that would be and whether this is going to be another potential source of problems? Cheers, Dave.

Thanks again, especially for the incredibly useful links! I don't know what I would do without the members of this forum, you have helped me so much so many times now. Glad to see from the MS article that aborting the setup before changing the board is just an alternative to running a repair after installing it, as you would have to do if the original board was dead. As I said, I'm hoping not to have to do that, but there's only one way to find out! I did some research on Windows PE, and that looks complicated to deploy. I'm really hoping I don't have to get into that. At the end of the day, if Windows XP refuses to start at all with the new board, and I can't resolve it, I hopefully still have the option of putting the old board back and then scratching my (and your) head(s) again, unless the failed attempt has irrevocably damaged my original installation, which I hope won't be the case!

Thanks jaclaz! Looking at that link, of course the dreaded HAL comes up, which is something else that's been worrying me. I've had systems where it's failed to boot with the "can't find HAL" error, and had to repair them, and this could well happen again of course. Interesting that the procedure on the link seems to involve starting off the install process, and then aborting it before changing the motherboard, and then letting it continue with the new board. I don't really want to do that if there's any chance that it won't be necessary. If I do have to do a repair install, I just hope that the installer is clever enough not to over-write all the SP3 system files (and their updated versions) with SP2 files, as the full installation disk I have is only SP2. I do have an SP3 installation disk but it's a clean install only OEM disk, so I don't want to use that. Incidentally Den recommended making a clone of my system drive onto an identical drive, but as my system drive is a SCSI drive that's not an option as I wouldn't be able to source an identical drive. I will of course back up all my system and data files onto other removable hard drives before I attempt anything!

Thanks Den, wise words as always! Thank you so much for those links too. One thing I hadn't mentioned about my existing system is that the system drives are not IDE connected, they are SCSI drives that work through an Adaptec PCI-X SCSI card. Whether this will make things easier or harder remains to be seen, but the problems mentioned with wrong IDE drivers preventing access to the boot drive hopefully won't occur as long as the SCSI board is recognised OK by the BIOS. It's using the Microsoft provided Adaptec driver in XP which should still be fine. Someone has reported on one of the links that they did get the system to boot OK without having to repair the installation, which was good to hear. At least I'm using a motherboard of the same brand with the same type of processors, so that's a plus point too. I'm prepared to have to re-activate XP if it's unhappy about apparently being on a different computer. I have the disk it was installed from, which is a full install disk, not an OEM or upgrade disk, so I'm not expecting any problems with that. As an aside, I did something similar to this with my netbook in fact, which is dual boot XP and 8.1. I found a better specified unit with Windows 7 Starter on it, and I just swapped the hard drives over. I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get Windows 8.1 activated again, involving putting in huge strings of numbers from an automated telephone system, but Windows XP just booted and carried on as if nothing had happened! The two systems were quite similar though with almost the same Intel chipset and processor. The spec of the new unit was slightly better, but the main difference was that the memory could be upgraded to 4 GB, which was physically impossible in the original unit.

Hi again guys. Just wanted to update you on where I am now with this. I have now obtained a used Supermicro X7DAL-E motherboard, which I was very lucky to get from a guy in Germany for £65 including shipping, and it came with two 2.33 GHz dual core Xeon processors with heat sinks, and 4 GB of memory. As that's the equivalent of around $108, I think I got a bargain there! Although originally designed for XP/Server 2003 of course the seller said it had been running Windows 7 fine, which was good to hear. I was puzzled to find that the physical layout of my board was quite different in places to the diagram in the printed manual which came with it. On further investigation, I found that the board I have is actually a later revision which was updated to add support for quad core processors (the manual that came with it says dual core only). The information and later manual on the Supermicro site confirm this, so I decided to see if I could find the best processors that the board was capable of supporting. Again I was very lucky to find someone selling used on eBay the quad core 3.16 GHz Xeons that are the maximum I can use. They cost me £40 (around $67) each. Another bargain because I found some companies still selling them new for over $1000 each! I was hoping to have them by now, but I should now get them on Monday. What I'm now intending to do is to fit the quad core processors to the board, with the 4 GB of RAM that came with it, and just swap the "new" motherboard with my present one. I'm hoping (praying!) that Windows XP will just work, although it will have to sort out the drivers of course (I've got the latest ones from Supermicro burnt onto a bootable CD.) I have also had to buy a new graphics card of course, as my old board was AGP, and I've got a cheap ASUS 1 GB AMD Radeon based card. When (if) Windows XP is up and running again, then I'll really pray hard and try to boot into Windows 98. I suspect it may well not start up at all, and at very least it will have severe problems with the graphics. I remember how hard it was to get it to work with a 512 MB graphics card, I would imagine it will choke badly with a 1 GB one! I'll keep you all posted! Cheers, Dave.

Yes, a very critical security patch I guess that couldn't wait!