alexmocanu

Windows 95 and 98 on some old laptops and several virtual machines for both fun and work related stuff

Hello, For the last 3-4 months or so MSFN isn't accessible from Romania anymore. I can easily browse through a VPN, but I was curious about what happened. I thought the website was gone.

Thanks for your help, Offset 64512 worked perfectly and Windows recognized the new drive. I've done some more tests by transferring data to/from the CF card, booted the old laptop from it, ran some dos games and so far it seems to work, no data loss or anything so far.

Sorry for the late reply. I tried with that offset but it's the same... no luck. I have attached the first 500 KB from one of those CF cards in case it helps. dump.img

I was able to mount the FAT32 partition on that card on Linux like this. From what I read so far Ontrack shifts the partition table to sector 63 So I thought about trying with loop devices. On my machine the USB CF card reader appears as /dev/sdb with this OnTrack partition: Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdb1 * 9 31291784 31291776 14.9G 54 OnTrackDM6 First I scanned the device: losetup --partscan --find --show -o 32256 /dev/sdb Where 32256 = 63 sectors * 512 bytes per sector This return the name of a loop device (in my case it was loop0) Then i listed the content of that loop device: fdisk /dev/loop0 -l Which returned this: Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/loop0p1 * 63 31278554 31278492 14.9G c W95 FAT32 (LBA) From there I saw that the FAT32 partition is accessible under /dev/loop0p1 so I mounted that with a command like this: mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/my_card And now I can easily transfer files from/to that card. Next step would be to find a solution for Windows. I tried using IMDISK (as administrator) but no luck so far ... it mounted something under the "X:" letter but asked me to format the drive: imdisk -a -f \\.\physicaldrive3 -b 32256 -s 16014587904 -o ro -m X: For "-s" I calculated size = no. of sectors * 512

Thank You for answering. Modifying a USB driver would not do for my use case, I need to be able to read those cards on any modern machine to transfer files easily. BOOTMAN would seem to be a better choice, so I downloaded both demo packages from you site and ran the "48bitlba.exe" tests and they returned these messages: BOOTMAND => "Drive 80: 495MB = 0967680 Sectors Not 48-Bit Disk" BOOTMAN1 => "Drive 1: 495MB = 967680 Sectors Not 48-Bit Disk" That means that my cf adapter and card might not be combatible with BOOTMAN on this particular machine? For reference I used the same CF Card with both packages (a 16 GB Sandisk Ultra card) and the CF adapter is a Delock 91655. If it makes any difference I copied the contents of those 2 packages to some win98 boot floppy images and booted them using CD's and over the network using PXE with the same result.

I have a very old laptop (Dell Latitude L400) I use for retro-gaming in which I replaced the the hard drive with a CF Card Adapter and I use several 16 GB cards with it, swapping them as needed. Since the BIOS doesn't recognize the cards at their full capacity (it sees them as 400 MB drives) I had to use Ontrack Disk Manager (version 9.4) to setup those cards, So far everything seems to be ok, I was able to install DOS and Windows 98 on them and they see these cards at full capacity. The problem is that sometimes I would like to be able to use these cards with my main Windows 10 machine to transfer files faster than using the network, usb drives or burning cd's. Since Ontrack uses a custom partitioning scheme (it installs itself at the beginning of the drive and shifts the partition table to make room) I can't use these cards with neither Windows 10 or Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). So Is there any tool that would allow me to either mount the drives or be able to read/write data to them using a standard USB card reader? Any solution that would work on Windows, Linux or OSX would be perfect.

Sorry for the late reply. After trying these solutions and more, I reached the conclusion that Wimboot is a PITA, In the end I solved the issues by wiping out all partitions and doing a regular installation. Wimboot is all well and good as long as you turn off windows updates, otherwise it will eat up precious disk space fast. Rebuilding the WIM image every time new updates show up is more hassle than it's worth. To quote something I read on the internet (can't find the link atm): On a WIMBoot installation, existing data on disk cannot be deleted or updated. Since all data now resides inside a compressed file, deleting a file simply marks it ‘deleted’ and does not recover space from the WIM. It’s even worse when you modify a file that already exists in the WIM image: A duplicate, uncompressed copy is extracted to disk, so your modifications can be saved.This is why, on a tablet loaded with a modest number of Windows Updates, you rapidly run out of space. Updated files consume almost twice the storage on disk – the original files remain compressed, inside the ‘backing’ WIM file, and the new updated ones are stored on disk, fully uncompressed. I wonder what were they thinking when they came up with this wimboot thing.I should be more careful before buying a wimboot based device like this again

Hello, I own a Windows 8.1 tablet with 16 GB of internal storage that uses wim boot. Every time Windows updates itself available disk space shrinks (updated files are being copied to the system partition and are used instead of the ones in the recovery drive, that's how wimboot works anyway). If things keep going like this, as upated files keep piling up I will end up running out of space on the system partition (started with 5 GB of free space and now I'm down to 3). The Disk cleanup tool and similar ways of cleaning up aren't of big help...they remove backup files but the updated files need to be present to be used. I was wondering if there is a way to inject the updates into the recovery partition used for wim boot, thus freeing up space on the system drive and having an up to date wimboot image.