NTFS support in Win 98/SE/ME?

[jaclaz]

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.

Naah, I won't shout at you for this , but maybe you could insert additionally a USB to IDE and a IDE to SATA converter and use GPT, just to increase the probabilities that the thingy won't work

More seriously, try it on a "normal" hard disk (NOT USB, NOT bigger than 128 Gb, IDE) and/or in a VM (on a smallish virtual disk) it is well possible that any of the various "non-standard-at-windows-98-times" may play a role in this (or one among the zillion tweaks, unofficial updates, modified kernels and drivers that you are surely running).

jaclaz

Edited January 13, 2014 by jaclaz

[Nomen]

Maybe this was posted somewhere else in this thread?

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-win98/download.html

See also: http://www.storageforum.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-817.html and http://www.wilderssecurity.com/archive/index.php/t-350929.html

Edited January 11, 2014 by Nomen

[Dave-H]

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.

[schwups]

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.

Naah, I won't shout at you for this , but maybe you could insert additionally a USB to IDE and a IDE to SATA converter and use GPT, just to increase the probabilities that the thingy won't work

More seriously, try it on a "normal" hard disk (NOT USB, NOT bigger than 128 Mb, IDE) and/or in a VM (on a smallish virtual disk) it is well possible that any of thevarious "non-standard-at-windows-98-times" may play a role in this (or one among the zillion tweaks, unofficial updates, modified kernels and drivers that you are surely running).

jaclaz

NTFS4Win98 works here on 40GB drives up to 250GB drives both PATA and SATA. I don't have a bigger drive than 250GB. I never testet eSATA and I'm not sure about USB connection.

halohalo said about bigger drives:

Posted by halohalo on 19 January 2012 - 04:11 PM in Windows 9x / ME

On my Opteron PC(ATI Xpress 200 + Uli M1573 chipset) with 320GB hard drive, winternals' one is stable.

On my Pentium DC PC(Intel 865g + ICH5 chipset) with 640GB SATA hard drive, winternals' one always makes Win98SE crash when I delete files or use recycle bin.

I tried paragon's one and lost my files in NTFS partition. Since then, I have not installed paragon's one.

Edited January 11, 2014 by schwups

[Dave-H]

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!

[Drugwash]

Due to my very bad memory I can't tell exactly which version it was or what the problem was, but I do recall very long time ago I had some NTFS driver installed on a 9x machine and at some point a major problem popped up. Since then I never trusted any such driver. That is why nowadays my current 98SE machine doesn't use either of the available NTFS for 98 drivers although my HDD does have such a partition along with a ext2 (or ext3?) partition available read-only through a Total Commander plug-in.

I'm saying this just to back up previous posters that claim certain issues with the NTFS drivers under Win9x.

One idea just popped to mind: is it possible that the files don't "stick" due to a delay write (drive cache) setting enabled for the respective (USB) drive? It's worth a check but I couldn't tell where it is, if available in Win9x. I've seen that in XP though so there may be some way to control this in 9x too.

[jaclaz]

It could actually be a "write cache" activated on USB devices, see (though NOT Win9x related) the page here:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

the part titled "cache or not".

jaclaz

[dencorso]

Most caches can be flushed by using Sysinternals sync.exe, IIRR. It might be worthwhile to run sync before removal of the drive, while on 9x, just to see whether it makes any difference.

[jaclaz]

Most caches can be flushed by using Sysinternals sync.exe, IIRR. It might be worthwhile to run sync before removal of the drive, while on 9x, just to see whether it makes any difference.

Does sync.exe work on Win9x?

The text says "all windows" but the "client" is specified as "XP and above".

Usual MS crappy info?

http://technet.microsoft.com/it-it/sysinternals/bb897438.aspx

jaclaz

[dencorso]

Yes! sync does work on 9x/ME!

In fact it is one among the last 4 SysInternals Utilities that do so, according to CharlotteTheHarlot.

And yes, again, sort of... MS crappy info? Sure. But unusually extra-crappy.

[Dave-H]

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!

[dencorso]

Yes. I think that's a sound plan. The 50 GB IDE HDD seems quite right as a test subject.

[Dave-H]

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!

Edited January 17, 2014 by Dave-H

[schwups]

Copying and moving is done somehow in batches (packets) or rather intermittently here, too. The machine becomes very slow during the breaks.

Edited January 13, 2014 by schwups

[rloew]

I also think the bursty writing is due to caching. When writing to USB keys, the Key's activity light is continuously on even during the pauses at the use end. If you are planning to do a lot of transfers to an USB Device, you may want to lower the MaxFileCache setting and reboot before you start.