Disable specific device detection on boot (Win95)? Solved

[Goodmaneuver]

11 hours ago, awkduck said:

Optical serial mice are cheap on Ebay.

I have not seen any. Cheapest one in AU is $45 second hand and it it an underneath ball type.

[awkduck]

2 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

It removes the mouse and keyboard after installing the USB 1.1 driver. That is why you cannot catch the USB 2.0 install and you may not have the USB2 driver just yet but it is irrelevant. The solution is fairly simple really and this is what I determined what can be done,

Go into safe mode and setup a task to restart after say every 15 minutes or you can use a shut down screensaver or shutdown software. Then reboot and after the USB 1.1 driver is installed then the machine will reboot normally after the 15 minutes has expired. Installing the USB2 driver should not remove the USB devices but if it does then the machine will reboot again after the 15 minutes and the registry will be configured.

Your enthusiasm/ingenuity is in line with mine. The problem is that the only successful load, so far, is from ram. Nothing is saved after shutdown. Even if I configure everything on another machine, for booting on this one, the reboot clears everything.

So if the task could just exit to Dos, then maybe I could copy the registry for some tweaking.

[awkduck]

I've also thought about disabling detection, just to see that everything boots fine. If it did, has anyone configured devices without detection?

Edited January 10, 2022 by awkduck

[awkduck]

Just now, jaclaz said:

The grub4dos USB drivers do not run unless they are manually invoked, just for the record.

The reason they were developed/added originally was essentially because there are (were) motherboards that have USB 2.0 hardware but only have BIOS support for USB 1.1, on those, starting the internal USB driver makes booting (or copying to RAM/ map --mem) much faster.

Besides different (okder or newer) grub4dos versions may behave differently.

The blinking cursor is (typically) an issue with some fields in the bootsector (related to CHS geometry) that are "off".

It happens often that (for *some reasons*) the (more or less) crappy BIOSes assign to a device a "queer" geometry (different from the one the image or partition/volume was prepared/formatted with).

This may be influenced by the size of the device (this would also nicely explain why you have reports  of some devices working), and also - in some cases - by some assumptions by the bootloader/bootmanager.

It is a hit and miss game, I had similar (though not the same) issues with another Thin Client several years ago, and I remember how I threw at it everything (and the contrary of it) before being able to actually boot it from physicaldrive (IDE/ATA CF card and USB stick), again only for the record:

https://zeroshell.org/forums/topic/a-report-from-a-new-user/

It should be possible (though right now I have not a precise idea on how to exactly do it) to boot to the Win95 as image, configure it, then dd (using some dd port to dos or a win9x imaging program) it to a second image (essentially pulling data from the RAW drive) then boot this second image.

Still you should IMHO first try to boot from the actual volume partition (not map --mem), PLoP, makebootfat, *everything* should be attempted.

Can you make and post/attach a copy of your MBR and PBR?

jaclaz

I see, "usb --int". Good to know that its there. I am sure it will come in handy on many projects :)

The blinking cursor only happens from USB boot.

But there are all kinds of strange things with USB. Even with an ext4 partition, syslinux cannot traverse the root directory. The same is true with grub4dos. If I have menu.lst and grubldr in /boot/grub, it cannot be found. Everything needs to be in root. I've never seen that before.

I tried again booting the USB with a fat16 partition, using Dos mbr. When starting Win95 (no bootloader) it exits initiation and outputs "It is now safe to restart your computer" or something like that. Then if you reboot, the famous "c> cannot locate command.com". That probably is due to the fat16 partition not having the correct geometry. I've not had that issue when using a fat32 partition.

There are many MBR/PBR to choose from. Do you mean one from the actual IDE partition?

BTW, Zeroshell, is cool.

[awkduck]

Just now, Goodmaneuver said:

I have not seen any. Cheapest one in AU is $45 second hand and it it an underneath ball type.

They seem to have gone up in price, since I last looked. In US ebay $16+8 S+H. It looks like it has a special pad, that might be needed to use with it. I see a Win logo on the back of the box. Here

[Goodmaneuver]

2 hours ago, awkduck said:

If it did, has anyone configured devices without detection?

Did you try configuring an image for a boot to "D" drive from another PC with a RAM drive holding the OS. This way the IDE partition may not be of consequence and it will be "C" drive or the USB drive be "C" and the RAM drive will be "D". So the setup from 95 you make a folder named windows then it should ask where you want to install windows then type D:\Windows then make an image of that machine install then try it on your thin client. The RAM drive will need be stored on exit. I have a WYSE V30 Geode GX2 thin client but have never had it running. It has IDE, USB, PS2, NIC, Parallel, and serial.

You can disable detection by removing all system devices with PCI bus second last then APCI BIOS last. Then make an image of this and it should not seek to install hardware until manually told to.

Edited January 10, 2022 by Goodmaneuver

[awkduck]

I should have tried this before. For whatever reason cancel on somethings and next/finish on others finally allowed me in. Not sure which combo did it, but it worked. I'll have plenty of other problems ahead of me. But this problem is fixed.

This is still from a memory mapped boot. So I will keep trying to get a local boot working. Also, now it is possible that I might be able to change things from inside Win95; possible fix.

If I find something that works, I will report back on it.

Time to make a larger image file with more tools.

Thanks for the ideas, everyone.

[awkduck]

Just now, Goodmaneuver said:

Did you try configuring an image for a boot to "D" drive from another PC with a RAM drive holding the OS. This way the IDE partition may not be of consequence and it will be "C" drive or the USB drive be "C" and the RAM drive will be "D". So the setup from 95 you make a folder named windows then it should ask where you want to install windows then type D:\Windows then make an image of that machine install then try it on your thin client. The RAM drive will need be stored on exit. I have a WYSE V30 Geode GX2 thin client but have never had it running. It has IDE, USB, PS2, NIC Parallel, and serial.

I think that has VIA in it. I have some V90, V90L, and V90LE clients. They install Win95 nicely. But the video driver is buggy. It only seems to work if you uninstall DirectX. I think the driver was designed for DirectX9. I have heard that there might be ways to fix this. But nothing has worked for me. VEMB works though. I don't think Scitech would work. But I haven't tried.

Or you might have the Sx0 series. That is GeodeGX2. The older has CS5535 chip and newer (part number ending in L) has CS5536.

Edited January 10, 2022 by awkduck

[Goodmaneuver]

Yes you are correct it has a VIA 1GHz processor. I was looking at this and thought it was mine but it was not and these are like yours without PS2 and parallel I think. here

I need to find out the video chip for the V30.

[awkduck]

Yes, I have one of those (Sx0).

I think the chip (V30) is a P4M800.

There are plenty of handy tools for finding out specs. But A nice easy one is KolibriOS. The chip is displayed on the blue kernel boot screen. Once booted, there is a pci info tool that lists manf/dev ids. Its not bad for a 1.44mb OS. Any memdisk bootloader or direct map should work, for the 1.44 floppy img file. It has more applications from an addon pack (Doom/Quake/FFplay). But for me it is a nice quick tool for moving files from fat/ext*/ntfs to fat32. It has pretty good USB support and is only booted as a ramdrive. I totally hack the desktop, because its a bit cluttered for me.

Hope no one minds me selling this thing, while posting in a Win95 section. As a Win95.... fanatic, Kolibri has been almost as useful as Grub4dos. Though there are probably plenty of machines it won't work on.

[Goodmaneuver]

I found out that the V90 is an S3 Unichrome Pro video device. I have S3 chrome video drivers that I used with WinME that were good.

[awkduck]

The same driver supports 98 and 95. But either Win95 support is poor, or it doesn't support DirectX8(very well).

[Goodmaneuver]

DirectX 9c will install but you need the 2007 or closely dated version. You can still get this version from a game that was released at that time. Last time I installed it I went though my Steam games until I found one. For VC2008 you extract the EXE and install the MSI. Not sure if you need to do this with DirectX but it may need extracting then run the setup.

Edited January 10, 2022 by Goodmaneuver

[RainyShadow]

3 hours ago, awkduck said:

There are plenty of handy tools for finding out specs.

One small tool i still use is HDT.

 

2 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

DirectX 9c will install but you need the 2007 or closely dated version. You can still get this version from a game that was released at that time. Last time I installed it I went though my Steam games until I found one.

Got any CDs from old magazines? Check the demos/sharewares there. 

Or just download it, couple pages - this or this. 

Web says last version for Win95 is DX8, i remember having DX8 on my Win95OSR2, but can't recall if i got any newer on it or it was after the switch to Win98...

Edited January 10, 2022 by RainyShadow

[LoneCrusader]

There are no working USB2 or USB-HID (Keyboard, Mouse, etc) drivers for Windows 95 available in the wild (rloew and I spent many, many hours searching and testing to no avail); so this could place a major roadblock in your path if you have no PS/2 or other legacy ports.*

As pointed out earlier, even if a device provides Legacy KB/Mouse emulation during boot, once USB1 controller drivers are loaded in 95 this is lost. You can circumvent this to a degree by not loading USB1 drivers, but if you wish to use removable USB drives with your installation then this is not a viable alternative. I once managed to get through the device detection prompts on a system with no PS/2 ports by overloading the keystroke buffer with "Enter" presses before the KB emulation was lost.. but this still is not helpful if one cannot control the resulting installation once the desktop is reached.

* - But such things do exist. rloew managed to backport some of these things from 98 to 95 for me. I hope to eventually pack these things up with an installer to set everything up, but I never seem to be able to find the time to work on it (or any of my other computer projects) anymore.