Tripredacus

Helpful hint in regards to notebook drivers, from back then or even to today. Nothing is really proprietary when it comes to the stuff inside of notebooks. So usually if I can't find a driver for a particular model from the manufacturer's website, I will find out what a relevant cross-over model from another manufacturer is and look on their website. A real world example is that sometimes I have to build an image for a Clevo notebook before the drivers get put on Clevo's site or the ODM's site, but MSI and Asus sell notebooks that contain the same hardware so I will look on their sites for drivers. For the drivers you are missing, if you can post the hardware IDs of the devices in device manager (Just the VEN_/DEV_/SUBSYS lines) then others may be able to know where to find the stuff you need.

My experience is limited only having used Bard and Grok. Neither are good for technical questions about hard disks. That being said, both of those are good at general things like being able to read hex dumps or assembly. So just as an example, here are some info from Bard to your questions above but as I warned, you cannot take the answers as gospel. And there is a lot of fluff which I'll leave out. If it provides relevant links, I will post those. I prefaced the conversation about being relating to 2000/XP era. 2. Why do some MBRs have a copy of sector 0 in sector 1? So it doesn't actually answer the question really. All of these public LLMs are designed to add a bunch of explanatory content to answers as well. Sometimes the question needs to be re-worded as well. 3. Why do some FAT tables start at logical sector 32, others at 33, 34, or 37? Seems to be general information, no specifics. 4. Some partitioning programs don't create spaces between partitions. Doesn't this prevent proper alignment? In this response it is doing a comparison to AFd/SSD/4Kn, so I left out the extra text it generated about the above items that was referencing modern implementations. Links provided: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/152308/alphabetical-list-of-ghost-command-line.html https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm look familiar? 5. My friend is having trouble interpreting the binary code in an MBR. He can only recognize the boot signature 55AA in bytes 510 and 511. Is there any reference material that can help him understand the boot code? Understanding the MBR Structure: A good idea about searching in Github, of course, jaclaz could just come in here and answer all of these questions. 5.1. Why do some programs show the VBR OEM name as MSDOS5.0 while others show MSWIN4.1? The OEM name identifies the formatting tool's origin. MSDOS5.0 from MS DOS 5.0 and MSWIN4.1 from Windows 95 (OSR2) based tools. the LLM seems to indicate that MSWIN4.1 name means the file system supports VFAT/long filenames. I can't ask it about question 6 because I don't know what "the same program" refers to. Sector 12 (at least from my reading on the Starman site you linked earlier) has the NTLDR in it. 6.1: Why is backup sector 6 empty in logical partitions? It doesn't actually know the answer to this. LLMs typically won't have a response of "I don't know" and they end up speculating (or hallucinating) and I think the answers it gives to this question is one of those two results. It does provide one link that might be useful: https://sysplay.github.io/books/LinuxDrivers/book/Content/Part14.html 6.2 What do sectors 0, 1, and 2 contain in logical partitions? The further along questions during this instance seemed to get more helpful as time went on. If you have a google account you can talk to this LLM here: https://gemini.google.com/ While people seem split on using an AI/LLM for anything for various reasons, a few things are clear. First, they are just a tool and second this is (currently) where the future of the internet or computing is going. So I personally feel that people should get experience in dealing with these things, to understand how to read their responses, understand how to word things for interaction, etc. I have posted some of my own observations in this thread about that. And worst case scenario, maybe the future will be like that meme where the robot overlord spares the human from being killed because they used to talk online years ago.

To get this out of the way, the MBR is a standard but all of the different tools do something a little different. Things are not really as documented as we'd like or perhaps they are but are stuck in the dead internet somewhere. As for specific tools and how they manipulate disks, some may be more generic or some may be based on an intended or observed use. For example a tool that was tested on a *nix vs a Windows 98 vs a Windows XP disk may write the bits a little differently. And unfortunately, a lot of what we know to be true is not found through any sort of documentation but through actual testing. My input on the linked thread was not so much in regards to the disk but rather the BCD aspect of things. At first I would consider to ask an LLM some of these questions but so far none I have experience with are any good at figuring out disk related questions of this sort because it is mostly theory and public LLMs are trained on support articles. I had considered running my own LLM and only train it on hard disk related info, but I don't have the time for such an endeavor.

My thoughts on the matter end up being tainted by Embedded SKUs. I absolutely hated Windows 10 but I haven't really used retail Windows 10. Windows 11 seems to be an even worse disaster but my experience with that in any form is quite lacking. There were some changes to deployment that don't make any sense and I'm pretty sure that those issues are actually bugs. Unfortunately, I don't have a TAM anymore to interface with to resolve those issues. Even if I did have that access still, I feel like nothing would get resolved, especially since MS still hasn't fixed that bug in Office that I reported to them over 10 years ago. I do manage one system with Windows 11. The only thing that I like about it is the theming options. That system runs as a digital signage system. If whenever I have to personally move to Windows 11, I'll probably use an embedded version there also.

Which Thinkpad? What driver is installed?

It is not always just registry keys to look at in these PMLs. First thing to remember is that the process you attach to may not actually be the process that is doing all of the work. A child process may be spawned by w2ksp4-2_en.exe that is doing more things that are not captured here. Also, this seems to be extremely filtered. Two things for next step: 1. your PML shows that this file was written to, see what is in it for the same timestamp: C:\WINNT\system32\config\software.LOG. You could also check the system for *.log around the time you executed the EXE (you do this check right after running it) to see if any other files get updated with anything useful. 2. Check for a child/spawned process doing anything. I do not know the completeness of this PML but if there is nothing more than this then it doesn't appear that this process launched anything. What you may or may not be able to do is the next step to use Process Explorer to pause the w2ksp4-2_en.exe process. You can do this before the error message appears, but you can also do the following (without pausing/halting the process) once the message box is on the screen. In ProcExp (at least XP era versions) you can look at the properties of a process and it will show you all of the files and regkeys that it has open, as well as view the Strings tab for both image (not usually useful) and Memory option which may show paths not visible in lower pane.

It seems that you need to get a matching SP4 from the OEM who originally sold the installation of Datacenter and install that version. Maybe it wasn't always different bits, perhaps there were just instructions you needed to follow before running the update. I found information here, there is a table in the 2.1 section: https://web.archive.org/web/20041130034246/http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/servicepacks/SP4/ReadMeSP.htm I have not tried to install Datacenter myself because I tend to try using old software in their optimal setup... which means running on a cluster of which i don't have the hardware for., This document seems to indicate that IBM's implementation of Datacenter is locked down in some way. It mentions not being able to install software that has kernel access: http://ps-2.kev009.com/basil.holloway/ALL PDF/sg245845.pdf What you could try, potentially, is to attach procmon to the processes that are involved with running that update file to see if you can see what it might be looking at when it decides that the system isn't qualified and stops the installation to show the message. It might be that there is some old version of Procmon that works in Windows 2000, but maybe not. Here is a thread on superuser talking about other tools that you could try. https://serverfault.com/questions/129044/where-to-get-working-sysinternals-tools-for-windows-2000

It would be helpful if you could post the exact errors you get. And also get any error messages from log files.

Even on an old computer, I doubt you'd see a measurable speed difference in copy speed with what you are using. Gemini says that /v was added in MS-DOS 3.2 but doesn't give a reference link. But let's say that is the case, the reason for needing to add /v was likely to handle copying issues on floppy disks. You would be more likely to see a speed difference on a 286 and copying to/from actual floppy disks. In regards to /V/Y arrangement, this could be an issue with MS-DOS 7.1. While outside of your scope, you could see how other (actual) versions of MS-DOS handle this. COMMAND.COM should parse the entire command, read the options and then execute the command. If it does it in a FIFO method, it could be that (for some reason) it actually is totally ignoring the /Y or would (somehow) try to set that option after verification, and it shows you the overwrite prompt because of that. That is just a guess, but I wonder if DOS 5 or 6.22 has this issue. You could also see if it behaves the same way without setting the COPYCMD variable, just run COPY /V/Y manually to see if it has the same result. If it doesn't then obviously it has something to do with the environment variable.

It seems /V is silent and you'd only know that it is being used if verification fails. Of course there is certainly a way to test that, but I only have theory on that process and not any actual instructions. How I'd imagine that would have to be done is you would need to attach/use a debugger or other process manipulation tool, halt the copy process at some point and you'd need to manually change something. Not knowing exactly how the copy command works, I don't know if you could simply edit the source file or if you'd have to change something in memory, before resuming the process. Another thing that you'd probably need to figure out is how the command is actually verifying. Does it do a CRC check or a bit compare? You'd also want to know at which points in the process that copy gets the info from the source and destination file occurs, so that you would have a better idea of when to interject to cause a failure. Your ability to cause a verification to reliably fail may be very difficult to do under DOS.

Gemini indicates that both do the same thing under MS-DOS as you specified. It also states that the extra . in /Y./V is ignored by both command.com and cmd.exe interpreters. These should also be the same: SET COPYCMD=/Y/V SET COPYCMD=/Y /V Gemini does not know whether there are specific versions of MS-DOS where specific usage of delimiters matter. Of course, you are best to test both commands in a real world scenario before implementing them in your batch file, since LLMs can't/don't do any sort of testing and you have a greater ability to detect if there is actually a difference or not.

We may assist you in trying to find some of these but you can't expect us to do all of the work. Please type these first line of each in a post as text.

You'll need to get the hardware IDs of the devices you want to find drivers for. Usually just the VEN&DEV (or VID&PID) portions would suffice.

Done

You are not the only person on the forum.