Booting Windows 98SE from a Flash Drive

[dencorso]

Of course! Do not reformat it yet. Try the HxD Hex Editor. All you have to do is to copy the file I prepared, which is exactly one sector long, to offset 0 in the pendrive, which is the first sector, aka LBA 0.

But, just in case, do get also this older version of WinHex.

What is the last/best version of WinHex to run under Win98SE? The version in your link was v12.8 SR-10

v. 12.8 SR-10 *is* the last version of WinHex that runs on 9x/ME. The next version, 12.85 has full unicode support added, which makes it incompatible with 9x/ME.

Sorry for the terseness, I'm in a hurry, right now. I have to go away now, but I'll be back in the evening.

[Dave-H]

Well, I now have some bad news, and some VERY bad news!

I managed to copy and paste the MBR data from your file to the flash drive successfully, and I was pleased to find that Windows now recognised the drive again and I could display its contents and read from and write to it fine.

The first sector now matches the contents of your file exactly, with no mention of Plop.

I did the SYS command again, and verified that COMMAND.CON, IO.SYS, and MSDOS.SYS were present and correct.

Unfortunately it's still not working!

I'm still getting "operating system not found" if I try and boot from it.

I tried booting from a floppy with the flash drive set as the next boot device, and it is being seen as drive C: so it's not a drive letter problem.

It seems to now be all correct, but the drive just doesn't seem to be bootable.

Anyway, now the even worse news.

Unfortunately when I copied and pasted the data from your file the first time, I managed to paste it into the WRONG DRIVE!

Apart from total stupidity on my part, my only explanation is that mbrwiz had always identified the flash drive as drive 3, and when I went to use the hex editor, I thought, "oh yes, drive 3" and selected it.

Of course what I'd selected was "HARD DRIVE 3"!

So what I've done is screwed up the MBR of one of my hard drives.

Thank goodness it wasn't one of my system drives, so I can still boot both of my operating systems.

The drive I've screwed up is my archive drive that contains all my pictures, documents, videos etc.

Fortunately I do have a backup of the whole drive which was only made on Monday, so it's not the unmitigated disaster that it could have been, but is there any way of recovering this now?

It's just being seen as an un-formatted drive at the moment.

I will just reformat it and copy the backup to it if necessary, but I just wondered if there's any change of rescue.

Yours ashamedly, Dave.

:( :(

Edited April 18, 2012 by Dave-H

[loblo]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[dencorso]

Yes, TestDisk is the tool of choice. Fortunately, we know for sure that, since you copied DAVEMBR.BIN to the MBR of the wrong drive, only the MBR (i.e. one sector is damaged, and in fact less than 512 bytes, because the initial program loader (=IPL) in DAVEMBR.BIN is valid and generic, so that only the partition table was lost). So, bear in mind that *ALL* your data remains in the disk intact, and TestDisk is very apt at rebuilding partition tables, so I'm confident you'll be able to recover fast. When you finish that recovery we'll get back to the pendrive, OK? I'll let loblo guide you through the hard disk partition table recovery. I'll be along from now on, for several hours, but not alway able to connect, because I must replace a motherboard tonight, and that'll be a somewhat long task I didn't foresee, but cannot avoid.

[Dave-H]

Thanks den, and thanks even more at this moment to loblo!

That program was a lifesaver and rescued the damaged disk with no problem whatsoever.

I'm so grateful, I thought my carelessness had resulted in a whole lot of tedious grief.

:thumbup :thumbup

Now back to why the flash drive won't boot any more............

Edited April 18, 2012 by Dave-H

[dencorso]

Congratulations for the recovery of your data disk!

Whatever we do henceforward, I'm sure you'll triple-check it's being done to the pendrive and the pendrive alone.

But, right now, I have a quite simple test to propose: you did create a true Plop boot diskette, besides the Plop instalation floppy that started this whole problem, right? So, boot to it, you'll see the default boot menu superimposed on a starfield screensaver.

Then, insert the pendrive, making sure it's the only usb device present, select USB and hit enter.

Does the pendrive boot?

[Dave-H]

OK, I think we're getting warmer!

The pen drive does boot to the the Windows 98 startup options screen (as it should do) when the system is started from the Plop boot floppy.

However, it will only work to the command prompt.

All the CD-ROM and mouse drivers load fine in that case.

However if I try and load Windows, in normal or safe mode, it starts loading and almost immediately stops with a drive C: write protect error.

So it looks as if something on the pen drive has become write protected/read only.

I can write to it fine normally, so I think this is something to do with Plop again.

There is a section in the Plop documentation which worried me at the time I read it, but then thought no more of it.

It's in the "DOS and the USB driver" section of readme.html, and under the "The Boot Manager as USB hard disk driver for DOS" heading it says -

"I know this is very special. Maybe it's useful for some people. You have to configure the plpbt.bin with plpcfgbt to use int19h instead of booting the operating system.

plpcfgbt int19h=on plpbt.bin

Now you have to start plpbt.bin with a boot manager like grub, syslinux or whatever during boot time (supported boot managers see here). Choose USB and the boot manager will install the usb driver and go back to your boot manager. If you start DOS you will have access to your usb drive as last hard disk. But remember, the usb drive is only as "read only" device available.

If it works for you then use plpcfgbt int19h=on stm=hidden cnt=on cntval=1 dbt=usb plpbt.bin"

Is this significant? If it means what I think it means, we've been wasting our time all along!

I don't think we're actually using this scenario, but is it possible that the pen drive has indeed become read only as far as Plop is concerned?

Edited April 19, 2012 by Dave-H

[dencorso]

Now, that's wonderful good news! The Plop USB driver is indeed read-only. It'll let you boot just so far, not really run Windows. Booting with Plop was intended to be a test os USB 2.0 speed vs. USB 1.x speed all along, nothing more. But the fact that it does boot using Plop shows we've succeeded in recovering the pendrive all right.

Now, when you try to boot without Plop you're getting "Operating sistem not found". This tends to indicate that very probably the problem does not lie with the pendrive itself (in most cases). On one of the Apendix pages of the Supemicro X5DAE Motherboard Manual "Operating sistem not found" is indeed documented as one of the error messages of the Phoenix BIOS. The exact phrase "Operating system not found" does not exist in the Win 98SE MS-DOS, nor in the MBR you're using. As I said before, the MBR contains just two relevant strings, worded exactly as: "Error loading operating system." and "Missing operating system." And the standard PBR (= Boot Sector or VBR) for FAT-32 contains the following strings, worded exactly as: "Invalid system disk"; "Disk I/O error" and "Replace the disk, and then press any key". Finally IO.SYS contains the famous "Starting Windows 98..." message, which you did not see, so we cannot be arriving that far.

So, then, revise your BIOS boot device order configuration. On some machines, at the earliest stages of booting, one can hit F2 (others want Del) to access the BIOS configuration and F12 (others want Esc) to access a direct boot device selection menu. Not all machines do have a direct boot device selection menu. My main machine, for instance, doesn't have it, but my Asus Eee PC 900 has it. Does the X5DAE Motherboard have one such menu? The manual is far from clear about this point, but it seems there's not such a menu. But I have to ask anyway, just in case.

[Dave-H]

So, then, revise your BIOS boot device order configuration. On some machines, at the earliest stages of booting, one can hit F2 (others want Del) to access the BIOS configuration and F12 (others want Esc) to access a direct boot device selection menu. Not all machines do have a direct boot device selection menu. My main machine, for instance, doesn't have it, but my Asus Eee PC 900 has it. Does the X5DAE Motherboard have one such menu? The manual is far from clear about this point, but it seems there's not such a menu. But I have to ask anyway, just in case.

My system's BIOS certainly does have a boot order menu, which is what I've been using all along to get it to boot from the pen drive instead of the hard drive.

Normally the hard drive is set as the first boot device. If I want to boot from a floppy I have to move "removable devices" to the top of the list.

If you expand the hard drive entry all the hard drives are listed, and the pen drive if I've booted with it inserted.

I just move it to the top of the list to boot from it, and that always worked fine until I started messing around with Plop.

[dencorso]

OK. So let's investigate the pendrive some more.

1) How did you make it bootable originally (they usually are not)?

2) Please download ChipGenius, run it with the pendrive inserted (under XP SP3) and post its report on the pendrive.

3) When you insert it, under already running Win XP SP3, and then open Windows Explorer and right-click on the pendrive's letter, is there an "Eject" entry on the pop-up menu (as indicated by the red arrow in the attached image)?

[Dave-H]

OK. So let's investigate the pendrive some more.

1) How did you make it bootable originally (they usually are not)?

I used the HP "USB Disk Storage Format Tool" HPUSBFW.EXE.

2) Please download ChipGenius, run it with the pendrive inserted (under XP SP3) and post its report on the pendrive.

Do you remember this?!

Well, it's the same pen drive!

I remember ChipGenius from back then.

Anyway, here's what it says about the pen drive now -

Description: [i:][J:]USB Mass Storage Device(Integral/Integral ICE Flash Drive/ICE Flash Drive)

Device Type: Mass Storage Device

Protocal Version: USB 2.00

Current Speed: High Speed

Max Current: 200mA

USB Device ID: VID = 13FE PID = 1D21

Serial Number: 909A1F2A0006

Device Vendor: Integral

Device Name: ICE Flash Drive

Device Revision: 0110

Manufacturer: Integral/Integral

Product Model: ICE Flash Drive/ICE Flash Drive

Product Revision: PMAP/PMAP

Chip Vendor: Phison

Chip Part-Number: PS2251-56(PS2156) - F/W 01.01.10 [2006-06-26]

Flash ID Code: 98D384A5 - Toshiba [MLC-2K]

Tools on web: http://dl.mydigit.net/special/up/phison.html

3) When you insert it, under already running Win XP SP3, and then open Windows Explorer and right-click on the pendrive's letter, is there an "Eject" entry on the pop-up menu (as indicated by the red arrow in the attached image)?

Yes, there is an "eject" entry in the list.

[dencorso]

OMG, it's the Integral ICE USB 2.0 Flash Drive!!! How could I ever have forgotten about it?

Well, I confess I'm baffled. What I can suggest, right now, is: no matter what has happened, the partition containing Win 98 and your data is OK. So, this is a great opportunity to acquire a good old-fashioned and trustworthy partition image, as it is now. Then we can move on to more hardcore experimentation.

I just thought of the "MBR Unbalance" jaclaz has discussed extensively in the past. That may be it. I think I've just corrected for it that MBR I'd sent you before. So the new version is attached. Just copy it to LBA 0 (the first sector of the pendrive), the same way you did it before, and attempt to boot from it. Let's see what happens.

DAVEMBR2.zip

[jaclaz]

Hmmm, you guys had way too much fun while I was away.

@Dave-H

Start form scratch.

Just partition/format the thing with RMPREPUSB.

For the record RMPREPUSB was developed - among other reasons - to correct a number of misbehaviours of the HP Format utility, and applies a couple of "tricks" sometimes useful.

Using the HP Format utility in 2012 is "looking (UNNEEDEDLY) for troubles.

jaclaz

[Dave-H]

Hi again jaclaz, I didn't realise you had been away.

I have downloaded and installed RMPrepUSB 2.1.630 (not the beta version) ready to be deployed if necessary.

I tried den's latest MBR file, and sorry to report it's made no difference.

It still gives "OS not found" if I try and boot directly, and via Plop it will only go to the command prompt without an immediate write error.

I noticed this time that if I do boot to the command prompt with it, I cannot access my system drive (normally drive C: of course, but in this case drive D:).

I can access all the other drives fine, but with drive D: although I can get to a D:> prompt, if I try and actually access the drive I get the error message "Invalid Media Type Reading Drive D". Very strange.

I get the write error on the C: drive again if I try and copy anything to it from one of the dives I can access.

I'm beginning to think that jaclaz is right, and we're running out of options to actually fix this, educational though it has been, and maybe it is time to just reformat the pen drive, copy my backup to it, and hopefully then be able to boot to Windows 98 from it as before.

What do you reckon den?

[dencorso]

I'm beginning to think that jaclaz is right, and we're running out of options to actually fix this, educational though it has been, and maybe it is time to just reformat the pen drive, copy my backup to it, and hopefully then be able to boot to Windows 98 from it as before.

What do you reckon den?

Yeah, enough is enough! Just make sure your backup is really up-to-date, or make a further one, just in case. Then go ahead, as jaclaz suggested. Let's get it working once more.

@jaclaz: Welcome back, my friend!