Marius '95

No, it wasn't that. But I fixed it somehow. Inspired by @defuser, I opened regedit and manually removed all I could find about the old sound cards. Then I manually installed the SoundBlaster non-PnP driver, the one provided by Win98. The sound card appeared in Multimedia and works with the onboard AC97 in SBPro compatiibility mode. I'm doing a backup now, then I'll remove SBPro and install the normal VIA AC97 driver.

Hi! I'm back to MSFN after a very long absence. It's nice to see the Win9x section is still here. I finally have a new (but old) PC that is Win98-compatible and I tried to make it work, but I'm a little rusty after using Win7 and 10 for so long. I need some help. Everyone knows that installing a clean Win98 isn't the most pleasurable experience, especially adding patches, fixes, tweaks, installing programs, configuring everything, etc. I remember it took 2 days to do a full reinstall. So, when I was using Win98 as my main OS, to avoid a full reinstall, I saved a fresh Win98, patched, tweaked and with all my usual programs installed and configured, packed as DriveSpace volume and stored on a CD. When I need a reinstall, I would delete the old DriveSpece volume and restore the saved one from the CD. Unlike WinXP, in Win98 this restore method also worked after major hardware changes, such as replacing the entire computer: I would first boot in Safe Mode, empty the Device Manager except for ACPI, and then reboot in normal mode. After reboot, Win98 would detect all the devices again on the new machine and everything would work as if it was originally installed there. I did this dozens of times and I had no problems. I still have that saved Win98 volume and I tried to use it on this new machine. But this time it didn't work as expected. I have a very weird problem: There are no sound devices available in Control Panel / Multimedia. The Output and Input selection boxes are grayed out, as if no sound cards are installed, but the sound card is OK in Device Manager and the mixer, wave out and FM synth are visible in Multimedia / Advanced tab. I tried with a different card - same problem. Any ideeas what could cause this and how to fix it? I would like to avoid doing a fresh install. Thanks.

I know. I'm not using a download manager. Speed is low and most probably PHP max execution time is exceeded before download is complete. PS: Nevermind. Download completed without error this morning.

I can't download. Does anyone have a mirror that supports resuming?

Hello everyone! Do you know any advanced formatting tool for FAT12 / FAT16 / FAT32? I want to do some testing and I need advanced formatting options like setting the number of reserved sectors following the boot record, setting the number of FAT copies, setting formatted partition size and location independent of partition table (i.e. write a filesystem structure somewhere on the disk while no partitions are defined in the partition table), etc. I also need a tool to display advanced partition and filesystem information like the number of reserved sectors, 1st and 2nd FAT locations and size (first and last sector number, bytes used), position of the first and last cluster (sector #), position of root directory (sector and cluster), etc. Thank you.

I changed the motherboard recently. The old one was Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA, the last motherboard with AGP. I had minor problems with onboard network driver, but there is an unofficial "Unified Remix Driver" v11.16 that makes the system usable. I did not use onboard sound. My new motherboard is Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P. Major storage problems here! I'm giving you some tips if you ever need to run Win9x on this kind of board. Hardware configuration AM3 CPU socket, DDR3, two gigabit Ethernet adapters, 2 PCI slots and a lot of PCI-E slots. This board has AMD SB750 southbridge. There are 6 SATA and 1 PATA connectors from the southbridge. This board also has 2 JMicron controllers with 4 SATA connectors. Logical organisation When set to IDE Compatiblity Mode, storage connectors are organised like this: - 4 SATA from JMicron controller are detected as one IDE controller with 2 channels. SATA0 is detected as Primary Master, SATA1 is Primary Slave, SATA2 is Secondary Master and SATA3 is Secondary Slave. - First 4 SATA (SATA0-3) from AMD SB750 are detected as another IDE controller with the same configuration. - PATA connector and the last 2 SATA from AMD SB750 are detected as the third IDE controller. PATA is the Primary Channel, SATA4 and SATA5 are Secondary Master and Slave. Win98 will NOT load ESDI_506.PDR if JMicron controller and the first 4 SB750 SATA ports (0-3) are enabled. JMicron controller can be disabled in BIOS, but the southbridge controller cannot be disabled. SATA0-3 must be set as AHCI/RAID so that Win98 will not try to load the IDE driver. You can boot Win98 form a PATA drive or you can set SATA4 and 5 in IDE Compatibility Mode and boot from a drive connected to these ports. ESDI_506.PDR will load ONLY in this configuration. Warning! Win98 will cause data corruption if a HDD is connected to SATA ports 0-3! Only connect a SATA HDD to SATA4 or SATA5 ports! Now, the good news! - There are 2 PCI slots to be used for a VGA and sound card. - PCI VGA can be set as the active card in BIOS so that two cards (old PCI for Win98 and a new PCI-E card) can be installed in the same computer. - Multi-core CPUs can be partially disabled, so that only one core remains active when using Win98. - Win98 works fine with DEVICE=HIMEMX.EXE /MAX=524288 in CONFIG.SYS and no other settings on a system with 4GB RAM. I will try to increase /MAX setting later to see how far it can go. - CMOS settings can be saved as a profile in BIOS setup. The user can save 2 profiles: one for Win98 with all the special settings above, and one for a newer OS. To boot Win98, just enter BIOS and load Win98 profile.