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Ntfs Support In Win98se Or Me?


Shadow_Fi

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Heres what i mean i'm running Win98SE on fat32 which is fine

i wanna connect a ntfs hard drive and convert it to fat32

and connect a fat32 drive and convert to ntfs meaning i wanna be able to flip flop

at will how do i get this support?

Edited by PROBLEMCHYLD
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Flip flopping between the 2 quickly and easily might be a problem, converting to ntfs is no problem but converting from ntfs to fat32 is where the problem lies. Apparently partition manager 8 can allegedly do this, but I would back any important data up first.

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Heres what i mean i'm running Win98SE on fat32 which is fine

i wanna connect a ntfs hard drive and convert it to fat32

and connect a fat32 drive and convert to ntfs meaning i wanna be able to flip flop

at will how do i get this support?

Powerquest's Partition Magic program, PROBLEMCHYLD! Partition Magic has been around for more than a decade and can safely convert from many different file system formats (whether it's NTFS, FAT16, FAT32). It can do it all without loss of data. buy yourself a copy of Partition Magic and you wont be sorry.

but as oscardog stated, back up important data before using third party partition tools to switch file system formats.

Edited by erpdude8
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I believe you can get NTFS support in Win9x by loading the freeware read/write driver mentioned earlier (ntfs4dos?) and using the drive in MS-DOS compatibility mode, which forces read/write to go via the DOS kernel, i.e. through the ntfs4dos driver.

I remember a year or so ago, some users on a Chinese forum were able to get Win95 to *boot* from an NTFS partition using a customised bootloader (I believe it was a heavily modified NTLDR, lol) and a read/write filesystem driver. Lost the link to that though :(

Edited by LLXX
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I imagine that write a ntfs driver for win 9x is possible (although I'm not able to do it and not for boot partition) by get ntfs.sys and ntoskrnl.exe from win xp sp2 and using them in this way:

It takes the files and drivers that compose NTFS from an existing Windows NT/2000/XP installation and simulates the environment they normally run in, allowing them to run inside of MS-DOS. This approach allows NTFSDOS Professional to access your NTFS volumes using the same Microsoft drivers that Windows NT/2000/XP uses, ensuring compatibility with your NTFS drives regardless of the version and Service Pack of NT you happen to use.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Ntfs...ofessional.html

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I imagine that write a ntfs driver for win 9x is possible (although I'm not able to do it and not for boot partition) by get ntfs.sys and ntoskrnl.exe from win xp sp2 and using them in this way:
It takes the files and drivers that compose NTFS from an existing Windows NT/2000/XP installation and simulates the environment they normally run in, allowing them to run inside of MS-DOS. This approach allows NTFSDOS Professional to access your NTFS volumes using the same Microsoft drivers that Windows NT/2000/XP uses, ensuring compatibility with your NTFS drives regardless of the version and Service Pack of NT you happen to use.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Ntfs...ofessional.html

NTFS for Win98 from sysinternals provided fully accessible drives as native windows volumes, NTFS for Windows 98 uses the NTFS and NTOSKRNL system files from a Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP configuration.

The unreged version allowed read only whilst the reged version allowed read/write but since ms took over sysinternals it seemed to disappear, looks like ms does not want us accessing NTFS via win98 anymore.

It is still around in the wild though and is well worth picking up

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Just for the record, there is a big difference in the way Winternals/Sysinternals NTFSDOS or NTFS for Win98 work and in the way Datapol/Avira NTFS4DOS work.

The latter is a filesystem driver written from scratch, independent from any other NT/2K/XP file.

The first ones use original files from NT/2K/XP, so beside the cost of the Winternals license, you also need a license for one of the NT based Microsoft Operating Systems.

This is the same legal problem faced by initial Linux NTFS drivers by Jan Kratochvil, CAPTIVE:

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

jaclaz

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They're using the ReactOS kernel for NTFS... lol

Maybe you can use those ReactOS files with the SysInternals driver too.

The unreged version allowed read only whilst the reged version allowed read/write but since ms took over sysinternals it seemed to disappear, looks like ms does not want us accessing NTFS via win98 anymore.

It is still around in the wild though and is well worth picking up

RO version is still here: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/NtfsWindows98.exe

Haven't bothered looking for full ver but it's probably out there on the Internet.

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If you have Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro 8, use the option to make a recovery CD. On the image will be a dos.img file, extract the contents with winimage and you can use the UFSD(Universal file system driver) the version I use is 5.02 (Jun 24 2005). It works perfectly in Dos and Win98. Enables NTFS read/write support, even allows Ext2/3 support and long file names in pure dos.

To get it working you only need to add CWSDPR0.EXE and NDOS.exe to your autoexec.bat before booting windows.

Edited by ricardrosen
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If you have Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro 8, use the option to make a recovery CD. On the image will be a dos.img file, extract the contents with winimage and you can use the UFSD(Universal file system driver) the version I use is 5.02 (Jun 24 2005). It works perfectly in Dos and Win98. Enables NTFS read/write support, even allows Ext2/3 support and long file names in pure dos.

To get it working you only need to add CWSDPR0.EXE and NDOS.exe to your autoexec.bat before booting windows.

Interesting.

- Make 2 partitions, one tiny and one large enough to hold Win98

- Install Windows 98 on the larger FAT32 partition.

- Convert partition to NTFS.

- Install DOS 7.0 kernel and filesystem driver on tiny (boot) partition

- Boot Win98 from NTFS partition B)

I should try that sometime and report back on the results

Edited by LLXX
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I'll happily try this out in a VM. I'd love to actually be able to use Win98 on an NTFS partition, just to see if no other modification would be needed.

Edit: Big problem - when you go and mount your ntfs partition, it gets assigned to a drive other than C:. The registry and system.ini files expect Windows to be running from the C: drive, not whatever drive you're actually running it off of.

I know that Partition magic offers a drive letter changer, and I might be inclined to try using that. Aside from that problem, I've managed to get Win98 to attempt to boot, Only stoppign when it was unable to load some files off the C:\Windows\system directory.

Edited by jimmsta
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I'll happily try this out in a VM. I'd love to actually be able to use Win98 on an NTFS partition, just to see if no other modification would be needed.

Edit: Big problem - when you go and mount your ntfs partition, it gets assigned to a drive other than C:. The registry and system.ini files expect Windows to be running from the C: drive, not whatever drive you're actually running it off of.

I know that Partition magic offers a drive letter changer, and I might be inclined to try using that. Aside from that problem, I've managed to get Win98 to attempt to boot, Only stoppign when it was unable to load some files off the C:\Windows\system directory.

Cannot really say, but maybe Letter Assigner can do the trick, don't be fooled by the page, the app includes a command line version too:

http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/

jaclaz

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I'll happily try this out in a VM. I'd love to actually be able to use Win98 on an NTFS partition, just to see if no other modification would be needed.

just remember, jimmsta. Win98's boot system files alone CANT recognize NTFS volumes, so do NOT use the NTFS partition as a BOOT partition.

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Edit: Big problem - when you go and mount your ntfs partition, it gets assigned to a drive other than C:. The registry and system.ini files expect Windows to be running from the C: drive, not whatever drive you're actually running it off of.
You should've installed Windows to the D: or whatever drive you were planning to convert to NTFS.

Actually, if you could format and make an NTFS partition from DOS, why not let the Win98 installer (which uses 3.1 -> DOS routines for file access AFAIK) install directly to the NTFS partition?

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Edit: Big problem - when you go and mount your ntfs partition, it gets assigned to a drive other than C:. The registry and system.ini files expect Windows to be running from the C: drive, not whatever drive you're actually running it off of.
You should've installed Windows to the D: or whatever drive you were planning to convert to NTFS.

Actually, if you could format and make an NTFS partition from DOS, why not let the Win98 installer (which uses 3.1 -> DOS routines for file access AFAIK) install directly to the NTFS partition?

That's a much better plan. I was trying to use a VM that I had previously set up. Now that I have a working NTFS bootdisk, I should be able to get somewhere by reinstalling 98 on a new VM.

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