Problem Installing Card Reader [Solved]

[dencorso]

jaclaz is right, Dave, there are as many solutions for this as the proverbial stars on the night sky, so any attempt at being exhaustive is futile. So I'll tell you something about those I use (but even of those there are many variants and I'll be focusing in the ones I use, too).

An Image may be thought of as an exact, sector by sector copy of a whole disk or of a single partition, regardless of any higher-level organization, and of these we have:

• A Forensic-quality Disk Image contains all sectors in the disk, and permits the re-creation of a truly identical image, including all the otherwise irrelevant unaccessible sectors created by partitioning (such as the last 62 sectors in the MBR track of a common HDD and all sectors in any leftover unpartitioned space at the end of the disk). Such an image requires , to be deployed on a diferent HDD than the one it was made from, that the second HDD be of the same brand, model and size, but will result in a truly exact copy, that is a true clone.
  
• A Common Disk Image may be thought as similar to the Forensic-quality one, but omitting those otherwise irrelevant secftors, and, maybe the free sectors also. When deployed it'll result in something near a true clone, but not identical. Depending on what was considered irrelevant at image acquisition time, it may result in an almost perfect copy of a disk, yet be imperfect enough to render it unbootable, or even completely unusable, in the worst case.
  
• An Exact Partition Image (my favorite) would be like the Forensic-quality Disk Image, but restricted to a single partition.
  
• A Common Partition Image would be like the Common Disk Image, but restricted to a single partition.
  

To create such images one may use a "dumb" imaging program or an adaptive imaging program. The "dumb" one will acquire the image as-is and deploy it "as-is". The adaptive one can do much more interesting tricks, such as deploying a partition image to a bigger partitition (thus serving to grow a partition in a safe way), or even deploying a partition image to a smaller partition, provided it's big enough to contain all but the free sectors in the image (thus serving, in a limited way, to shrink a partition safely). The same kind of tricks can also be played with full disk images.

The best imaging programs, besides being adaptive, are also capable of compressing the images they create, so that one has no need of compressing them with another program for storage purposes, and also provide one with an image browser, so that one can extract individual files from the (compressed or not) image without having to deploy it somewhere just to do so.

That much having been said, the bottom-line is: in principle, imaging is based in sectors, and should be independent of the underlying OS.

A Backup may be thought of as an exact, file by file copy of a whole disk or of a single partition, so it involves interpretation of the existing structure by the OS, and of these we have:

• A Full Backup
  
• An Incremental Backup
  

Taking the partition backup as the example, the full backup would be a file-by-file copy of all the contents of a partition to another empty partition or a directory (a somewhat worse alternative), while the incremental backup would be to add or update just the new and/or modified files to an already existing backup. So one always starts doing a full backup, but then can switch to incremental backups, which are much faster (at least when based solely on date-stamps and file sizes). The de-facto standard program to do backups is the freeware xxcopy, IMHO, and if we're thinking Win 9x/ME, one should use XXCOPY FREEWARE v.2.96.5 - http://www.xxcopy.com/download/xxfw2965.zip, which is the last version that works in 9x/ME.

I tend to favor using images for the system partitions (on a weekly to fortnightly basis) and incremental backing-up for data partitions, on a daily basis, because data partitions change much faster than system partitions. YMMV, though.

Edited January 15, 2010 by dencorso
3nd, and hopefully last, installment added.

[jaclaz]

Such an image, to be deployed in a diferent HDD than the one it was made from requires that the second HDD be of the same brand, model and size, but will result in a truly exact copy, that is a true clone.

NO.

NO need WHATEVER of being same brand, model or size.

The only thing that may (and only for some particular needs, please read as "booting if CHS is used by the BIOS") be needed is the hard disk having the same H/S geometry and of course it MUST be same or bigger size.

Different geometry can in any case be fixed, but since 99.99% (please read all) modern hard disks have an H/S geometry of 255/63, this will be a very rare problem.

jaclaz

[herbalist]

You've got a lot of options available for imaging or backing up your system. You can copy entire drives or partitions. You can also archive all of the files on a drive and handle the MBR, formatting and partitioning separately. Originally I used Acronis True Image, version 8, but didn't want the extra running processes. When I found that the bootable Acronis CD did everything I needed, I stopped installing the software. After setting up a multi-boot system, I found that the simplest way to back an OS was to boot to another OS and use it to copy or restore the first one. For the last year or so, I've been using 7zip to archive the contents of entire drives, not including the swap file. On single OS PCs, a bootable DOS CD with DPMI, LFN, and USB drivers running a command line version of 7Zip will also do the job. Each has their advantages. For my purposes, archiving the files and using separate utilities to partition and format drives is more suited to my needs. It's pretty much your choice whether you want to back up or image the entire OS as a unit or work with the file system, MBR, and partitioning/formatting separately.

[dencorso]

Such an image, to be deployed in a diferent HDD than the one it was made from requires that the second HDD be of the same brand, model and size, but will result in a truly exact copy, that is a true clone.

NO.

NO need WHATEVER of being same brand, model or size.

True enough. You're right, yet I'm right too.

This is just a problem of semantics...

The only way you can have a true clone is by using the same brand, model and size.

But you can, of course, do as you say and arrive at a near-enough clone, which will be indistinguishable from the true clone, for almost all (if not all) purposes, at least in real-word scenarios... and no, I just cannot come right away, from the top-of-my-head, with an example of a case in which they would not be indistinguishable, but I firmly believe there may be some such examples, if one really cares to search for them.

[jaclaz]

But you can, of course, do as you say and arrive at a near-enough clone, which will be indistinguishable from the true clone, for almost all purposes... and no, I just cannot come right away, from the top-of-my-head, with an example of a case in which they would not be indistinguishable, but I firmly believe there may be some such examples, if one really cares to search for them.

I am not going to start a quarrel with you on this trifling point , but rest assured that for ANY OS-level related thing such a "clone" will be indistinguishable.

Of course any strictly hardware related info, such as S.M.A.R.T. (BTW IMHO one of the smartest acronym for one of the stoopidest things ever invented by humans), HD firmware or REALLY low-level access to sectors (bypassing the internal HD re-mapping) this does NOT apply.

JFYI the above differences will exist - at least partially - ALSO if the "new" HD is EXACTLY the same brand, model and size.

jaclaz

[Dave-H]

Wow, thanks guys!

A lot of differing takes here on the same things.

I do actually have a drive imaging program, which is part of Norton Utilities.

I have it run every time Windows 98 starts (it doesn't work in Windows 2000) and it writes a data file each time, with a backup of the last one, to my C:, D:, and E: drives.

I assume that with this data, and a separate backup of all the system files on the drives, I should be able to restore my drive configuration and operating systems, using Norton's DOS recovery utilities. It's not something I've ever tried, and I hope I never have to!

I've only had a hard drive fail once, and I managed to coax it into life for long enough to get all the files off it onto another drive, and I did manage to restore the system without using the drive imaging files.

Anyway, this is way off topic from the original subject of this thread, and I don't think we should keep it going on this track for too much longer, especially as the original problem has now been declared to have been solved!

Edited November 25, 2009 by Dave-H

[jaclaz]

I do actually have a drive imaging program, which is part of Norton Utilities.

NO, you don't.

That is NOT a drive image program.

I have it run every time Windows 98 starts (it doesn't work in Windows 2000) and it writes a data file each time, with a backup of the last one, to my C:, D:, and E: drives.

...and it saves some data, very similar, essentially to what a system save does, plus, probably , some of the info we talked about.

Let's try to speak the same language (technical jargon in this case):

• a drive image is EXACTLY as big as the WHOLE size of the source (being it the WHOLE hard disk or a single partition/volume).
  
• most programs would allow you to compress this image, with results that depend greatly on the TYPE of contents of the drive and on the AMOUNT on data on it. (an image of hard disk filled up to the brim of .rar, .zip and .7z files won't be greatly compressed )
  
• there is ONLY one place where you CANNOT save a drive image, which is the SOURCE (i.e. NOT on the partition that the image represents or NOT on the same hard disk that the image represents as a whole)
  

jaclaz

[dencorso]

Most true. Norton Image is not an imaging program (it just saves a snapshot of vital system areas).

The imaging program from Norton/Symantec is Ghost (and for most purposes the best version of it is 2003).

Another main characteristic of a true image is that it's a time-frozen bit-by-bit replica of the original, and thus it *cannot* be acquired from within a live runing OS. To examplify using your system as a reference, Dave, you might acquire and image of the 98SE partition while running 2k, or an image of the 2k partition, while running 98SE. But to acquire a full disk image, you'd have to boot from a DOS diskette, because, in this case, both installed OSes would have to be inactive for the image acquisition to succeed. Or, in other words, while an OS is running it constantly makes changes to its own partition, and these changes would result in a flawed image being created, which would not correspond to the actual partition state at any time at all, because of being acquired while changes were actually being done to it. And since a realistic image acquisition procedure might take from 10 min to 1 h or more, a lot would have changed from the start till the end of the image acquisition.

[Dave-H]

Well, I just want to report that I've now connected my other main USB devices to Windows 98, including my HP printer with its card readers, and everything seemed to work OK.

I think we can consider this closed now (finally!) and I'd just like to say again how great everyone has been in sorting out this problem.

See you over on the Windows 2000 forum very soon!

[dencorso]

At long last, I've just finished updating post # 166.

[jds]

It appears the the waters were extremely muddied by the fact that Realtek posted a driver that doesn't actually work in Windows 98 (not on my system anyway) even though the download page clearly says that it supports all Windows versions from 98 Gold to XP!

The second fault condition, with the error in the Device Manager resources tab, was caused by the faulty driver.

The original fault, where there was no error in DM, but just no sound, seems to have gone away now I have cleaned out my system.

For anyone else with a Realtek AC'97 sound system and Windows 98, beware!

Version 4.00 works, version 4.06 (the latest posted) doesn't.

I have informed Realtek of this, I'm not holding my breath while waiting for a reply!

I know this is an old post but ...

I have the same (?) situation with a GA-8IEX Rev 2 motherboard that I'm trying to get going. I initially tried the Realtek drivers from Gigabyte, which correspond to version 4.06, then found this post and tracked down a copy of the 4.00 drivers. So basically, I uninstalled the 4.06 drivers via Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, then installed the 4.00 drivers.

Now, the drivers are installed and report as OK, but there is no sound. So, did you need to do anything special to retrograde these drivers (or do I have faulty hardware)?

Joe.

[Dave-H]

I know this is an old post but ...

I have the same (?) situation with a GA-8IEX Rev 2 motherboard that I'm trying to get going. I initially tried the Realtek drivers from Gigabyte, which correspond to version 4.06, then found this post and tracked down a copy of the 4.00 drivers. So basically, I uninstalled the 4.06 drivers via Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, then installed the 4.00 drivers.

Now, the drivers are installed and report as OK, but there is no sound. So, did you need to do anything special to retrograde these drivers (or do I have faulty hardware)?

Joe.

Hi Joe!

I'd almost forgotten about this!

Did you use Driver Cleaner to completely wipe all traces of the 4.06 driver?

If not, uninstall the driver you've got loaded, clean the system with Driver Cleaner, and try reinstalling version 4.00 again.

I think that's what eventually worked for me.

Good luck!

Cheers, Dave.

[jds]

I'd almost forgotten about this!

Did you use Driver Cleaner to completely wipe all traces of the 4.06 driver?

If not, uninstall the driver you've got loaded, clean the system with Driver Cleaner, and try reinstalling version 4.00 again.

I think that's what eventually worked for me.

Thanks Dave!

I tracked down a copy of Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 and followed the instructions in the ReadMe file (basically as above, with a trip via Safe Mode). It deleted a bunch of registry entries. When I re-installed the 4.00 drivers, there was a 'click' sound from the speakers. I'm pretty sure that was the first signs of life from them. Sound still didn't work, but after checking the MB manual, I realized there were two jumpers missing from a pin header labelled "F_AUDIO_I". That was the final piece of the puzzle and sound now works!

Joe.

[Dave-H]

Brilliant!

Glad you got it sorted.

[dencorso]

Brilliant!

Glad you got it sorted.

+1. Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 is precious!