Dave-H

I must say I was surprised to find the Malicious Software Removal Tool being offered to me by Windows Update this morning! I wonder too if that will be an ongoing thing. I suppose it depends on how different the tool is on later versions of Windows. If it's the same for all Windows versions I can see no reason not to carry on offering it to XP users, if it isn't I suspect this will quickly stop as they're not going to carry on producing a special version just for XP.

Exactly the same thing happened on my machine with the root certificates apparently rolling back to an older version. Puzzled me too, glad I wasn't the only one! Presumably root certificate updates have now ended for XP along with everything else, but what about the updates that the OS does regularly automatically, which seem to happen regardless of whether automatic updating is enabled in Windows Update? I mean the "crypt32" entries that appear in the Windows Application log - "Successful auto update retrieval of third-party root list sequence number from: <http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootseq.txt>" and "Successful auto update retrieval of third-party root list cab from: <http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootstl.cab>" Will they now end as well, and will the OS constantly throw error messages into the log because it can't find the update?

Thanks!

Were the patches that were rolled out by Microsoft this week the last ones for Windows XP, or will there actually be another set on April 8th, which is the second Tuesday of the month?

Really pleased to see this, now I can keep my Windows XP installation alive as I have my Windows 98SE installation thanks to the great experts here! I really hope that this will be an ongoing project where at least some post XP EOS hotfixes from later versions of Windows can be integrated into XP installations.

I had an update on my Technet forum thread posted by Bruno at MS this morning, and he says someone at MS has checked and the links are working. I've just checked, and now they are! The thread is here. They seem to be saying that they should always have been working and it was probably a temporary fault, but if it was it lasted for many many weeks! I would like to think that they've seen they were wrong and have just quietly updated them, which is a good result if it's true! Cheers, Dave.

@GrofLuigi Thanks very much for that, at least it will be a useful fall-back to make the links meaningful again if MS don't get their own links working again in XP! BTW I tried the equivalent links on a friend's Windows 7 machine, and they do work there, going to the newly formatted pages on Technet. @jaclaz Yes, some of the suggestions were next to useless, but that always seems to be the case with generic help files, wherever they're from.

Well sometimes they did indeed just go to a page which said that no further information was available, but they did often take you to a page which explained what the error message was about and suggest solutions. Obviously a web search on the error would do the job just as well, maybe better, but I still think that this facility should work if it's still being offered to the user, at least until all the relevant information about XP is removed from Microsoft's servers, which I hope won't happen for many years yet!

Got a reply today from the thread here which seems to indicate that the issue has been escalated. I'm not holding my breath of course, but good to see that it is being followed up.

Hi guys! I've posted about this problem here on the Technet forums. I did get a reply that sent me to here, where someone else had reported pretty much the same issue. I posted there as well, but the last activity in that thread was back in September last year, so I'm not holding out much hope of a response! As I said in both posts, I can't see any reason to suddenly withdraw all this information, and if it still there but the links don't work because it's moved, surely this should be corrected, either at Microsoft's end, or by publicising a registry edit to correct it manually on affected systems.

Well it has been like this for several weeks now, it hasn't only just happened, so I was surprised to find no mention of it here or on any other forums when I did a search, even the Microsoft help forums seem to have nothing about it. Maybe I should ask them, although from what I've seen of them the MS help forums seem to be very unhelpful, usually the MS people seem to just post links to other threads or possible solutions, the links don't resolve things, the OP then comes back and says that, and there's then no further response!

Thanks, not just me then! That's a bit of a relief, as at least I now know it's not just my systems. MS have obviously changed something that has made this non-functional after over ten years, why I cannot imagine. I'm just surprised that there seems to be no comment about this anywhere!

Come on guys, 62 views and not a single reply?! All I'm asking is if others are seeing the same problem!

Hi guys! I have two machines with XP SP3 on them, and they are both showing this problem. If I open an event in any of the Event Logs, and click on the "For more information, see Help and Support Center at...." link, I no longer get any information as I've always done before. I just get a "page not found" message, which then re-directs to Bing, where the offered links usually don't work either! This has been happening for a few weeks now. I've searched and can find no reference to this anywhere, so is it happening for everyone on XP? Is this something to do with end of support, which I would have thought unlikely, but was my first thought of course?! I have Windows 8.1 on a machine as well, and I know that MS didn't bother to make the Event Log help links work on that before it was released, and they never did on Windows 8 either, which i think is pretty outrageous for an OS that's now been out more than a year, but I've not read anything to the effect that they've now removed the facility on XP as well. So, is it just me, or is everyone seeing this? Cheers, Dave.

Thanks again guys, and sorry for the delay in replying. As I said in my last post, my most recent tests were much more encouraging, and the drive seems to be working OK now with the USB interface under 98 without files suddenly vanishing after they've supposedly been written to the drive! I have downloaded and installed the SysInternals "sync" utility, and it seems to work fine. Whether it makes any difference I can't really determine until I next have a problem with the drive, but I mainly use it on XP anyway as it can then use the much faster eSATA interface.

Still not getting any e-mail notification of replies! Checked all the settings and logged out and in again, I hope that may fix it. Thanks again Rudolph. I did some more tests today with the 1TB SATA drive with the USB interface before I saw your last message, with more encouraging results this time. It took me a while to get the drive recognised in Windows 98, as it was appearing in Device Manager but had no drive letter assigned, so it didn't appear in "My Computer" of course. I tried setting it as a removable drive, which allowed me to assign a drive letter. This was not too happy at all, causing system freezes, but when I removed the removable drive check mark in Device Manager it reverted to being a fixed drive and the letter I had assigned seemed to have "stuck". I could read the drive fine except for one of the test files I had left on it from last time. This would read fine in XP, but in Windows 98 any attempt to access it resulted in a "File System Error (1026)" message. I could read and write OK to it with other files though, including one over 1 GB, and now they did seem to "stick" and were still there after the drive was unmounted and remounted in 98, and in XP, which is an improvement on last time! I then rebooted the machine into XP with the drive unintentionally still powered and set to use the eSATA interface. Chkdsk ran automatically on it, and found quite a few errors - Checking file system on I: The type of the file system is NTFS. Volume label is NTFS 1TB. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue. Windows will now check the disk. Unable to locate the file name attribute of index entry test1.txt of index $I30 with parent 0x5 in file 0x5f. Deleting index entry test1.txt in index $I30 of file 5. Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive. CHKDSK is recovering lost files. Recovering orphaned file test2.txt (95) into directory file 5. Cleaning up 16 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9. Cleaning up 16 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9. Cleaning up 16 unused security descriptors. Windows has made corrections to the file system. 976760536 KB total disk space. 159867948 KB in 51 files. 52 KB in 33 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 96024 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 816796512 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 244190134 total allocation units on disk. 204199128 allocation units available on disk. Internal Info: 00 01 00 00 5e 00 00 00 7b 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ....^...{....... 07 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 2b 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........+....... 40 4b 4c 00 00 00 00 00 46 c3 23 00 00 00 00 00 @KL.....F.#..... ae 4c 2d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 .L-............. 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 12 a3 de 07 00 00 00 00 ................ d0 75 af be 00 00 00 00 68 46 07 00 33 00 00 00 .u......hF..3... 00 00 00 00 00 b0 90 1d 26 00 00 00 21 00 00 00 ........&...!... Test1.txt was the file I couldn't read under Windows 98, so it obviously had file system errors. I'll go back into 98 again later and see if I can now access it OK.

Hi Rudolph! Sorry, I only just saw your post, I didn't get an e-mail notification about it for some reason. Actually the writing in bursts, with the computer unresponsive in between the bursts, happened when I was writing to the fixed IDE drive, not when using the SATA-USB interface. I didn't try writing any really large files using the interface, because the other problem, with the files apparently not "sticking" on the drive, was more of a concern at the time. Now I know that the Paragon driver does actually work to read and write, I intend over the weekend to do some tests to see if the intermittent writing of very large files happens with the interface as well, and also whether I can fix the other problem, whatever it is, by tweaking caching settings.

Off topic for this forum of course, but I should mention that I'm still using a copy of Trend PC-cillin 2002 on Windows 98SE, and you can still manually download and install current pattern files for it, as I do every Monday!

Well I've done the same test as before using the 50 GB IDE drive in a caddy, and I'm pleased to report that all seems to be working as it should. I tried with small text files first as before and everything was OK, and then tried writing one of the files that had been on the drive when it was FAT32 back to it again in Windows 98. It was a quite large 1.11 GB avi file, and it did eventually write OK, but the system kept freezing while it was writing. The whole screen would freeze (except for the mouse cursor) and the keyboard would become unresponsive. I thought this was permanent the first time it happened, especially when the mouse cursor went on to freeze as well, but to my surprise it then recovered and wrote a bit more of the file, then freezing again, unfreezing and writing a bit more, over and over again. When the write process eventfully completed however, it did seem to have done it properly, and I could read the file in 98 and XP. Glad this proves that the Paragon driver really does work! It looks as if the initial problem was down to the SATA-USB interface, possibly combined with the very large size of the SATA NTFS drive. It does sound reasonable that it could be related to write caching, I will have to investigate that further. Such a shame that I have to use the USB interface at all, I did try with Rudolph Loew's help to see if I could get a driver that worked with my Silicon Image PCI-X SATA card under Windows 98, but eventually drew a complete blank. Rudolph has a generic driver solution, but it didn't work with my card unfortunately. If he can't make it work, I suspect that nobody can!

Thanks guys! I think what I need to do is try this, as already suggested, with a "normal" fixed drive, that doesn't have to rely on a SATA-USB interface. That will at least eliminate the USB connection as the source of the problem and prove whether the driver actually does work properly or not. Also whether the sheer size of the 1TB SATA drive has any bearing on the problem. I have a plug-in cradle on my system for which I have several caddies with various sizes of IDE drive in them. One of them is a 50 GB drive, which has a few files on it that I can quite easily transfer to another drive temporarily. I'll then re-format that IDE drive as NTFS and see if the same problem happens with that. It will take a while, but I'll let you know the outcome!

Interesting schwups, thanks very much. Especially interesting about files getting lost with the Paragon program! I've done some tests now, with very interesting results. I used simple text files, with just the name of the file in the actual file, e.g. "test1.txt" simply contained the data "test1". All the tests were done using the USB interface. Wrote the file "test1.txt" to the drive using XP, all fine as expected. Booted to 98, wrote the file "test2.txt" to the drive. All OK, could read both test1.txt and test2.txt fine in 98. Removed the drive in 98. Re-plugged the drive in 98. The test2.txt file had now disappeared. The test1.txt file was still OK. Renamed test1.txt to test2.txt. Removed and replaced the drive again. The new test2.txt was still there, but was now 0 bytes and not recognised if I tried to open it. Wrote a new file called test3.txt to the drive. Re-booted to XP. The original test1.txt was now back and readable, there was no sign of test2.txt or test3.txt! So, what do we make of that!

Thanks guys, gotta go away for a couple of hours now. I'll start the testing when I get back! @Nomen Thanks for that. The Paragon one is the version I've got, which says it's version 1.7.

I will try that when I get a chance. Firstly I need to go back into 98 (in XP at the moment) and confirm again that there really is a problem. I might have been doing something silly when I apparently had the issue (wouldn't be the first time!) I'll try first just disabling the recycle bin on the drive as recommended, although i doubt that's the problem. Er, how do you actually do that BTW, I thought the recycle bin was created by the OS whether you liked it or not! If the problem really is still there, I will try uninstalling and cleaning the system, and try with just the VXD installed without the partition manager bit. I should at this point specify what the hardware configuration is, just in case it's relevant. (I hope jaclaz doesn't shout at me now for not having mentioned something before which would have revealed what the problem is!) The drive is a 1TB drive in an external enclosure with a switchable eSATA or USB interface. I can use either interface in XP, but despite Rudolph Loew's best efforts, I can find no 98 driver support for the SATA card, so I have to use the USB interface in 98.

Den's version of PNTFS.VXD is the same as I've got installed, from the installation file I downloaded from Paragon, so it looks as if it should indeed be read and write capable. I will need to investigate further why I seemed to be having trouble getting files to "stick" on the drive. The serial numbers that are associated with some of these downloads (there's a text file included in the version here which includes a product key and serial number) are very confusing, as the program that's available now does not seem to need one, which would make sense as it's now a free program! I guess they are just a hangover from when it wasn't free, but it certainly confused the hell out of me!

LOL! I had actually already given up on it, purely because it didn't work! I'm just curious as I always am as to what exactly it is. I know, "curiosity killed the cat"! I suspect you're right, it is malware masquerading as a legitimate piece of software. Had the installer worked, it may have apparently installed what it said it would, but probably another load of crap as well. Bit of a clanger by the malware perpetrators not to make the installer work on Windows 98 though, a bit of a give-away really!