Auto-Patcher For Windows 98se (English)

[Drugwash]

Great reports, 2Turtles, thank you very much! I'm sure you gave soporific food for thought.

Soporific, regarding the :MISSING routine, you'll find it added at the very end of AutoPach.bat in my zip. I tried to do it in your style, I hope it got out right.

All it does is report if any of the files in code or bin are missing.

Regarding references to ErrChoic, they can be avoided simply by defining sections before the choice commands and looping back to that section on wrong key. Example (snippet from the debug mode choice I added in StartPch.bat):

echo. Do you want to enable debug mode? [Y/N]

:DebSel

choice>nul /c:yn /n

if errorlevel 2 goto DebN

if errorlevel 1 goto DebY

goto DebSel

But I'm sure you knew that already - I got that from your code. Believe it or not, I had no idea so many things can be done in a batch file - I never got around playing with them. But I learn fast... sometimes (and it looks very similar to BASIC, which I used to know pretty well back in the Z80 days).

[Eck]

2Turtles,

I think all those in your list need to be toggled on to be installed by auto-patcher. They are disabled by default. I remember going in and turning most of those on, then I got them. That was when using version 1.8. For those you want you can go in and run the installers manually or, and that's the beauty of this thing, you can simply run auto-patcher again. Just toggle those things on and run it. It won't reinstall all that stuff it installed the first time since it will detect that they are present.

[pjmelect]

I tried Auto-Patcher 1.8 for Windows98SE the other day and I have the following observations.

When first run Auto-Patcher Said that DUN 1.4 was not present, but I thought that I had installed it with Gapes service pack, is Gapes version of DUN 1.4 not detected by Auto-Patcher?

About a third of the updates weren’t installed because it said that “a newer version of the update was detected” is this message correct? I don’t believe that I have so many newer updates than Auto-Patcher. Should the message say “ the same or newer version of the update was detected”?

Kb905495 "started to loop thru installation and so was not installed again"

I then installed Auto-Patcher 1.92 and reran it, however no changes were made to my system, is this correct?

[soporific]

When first run Auto-Patcher Said that DUN 1.4 was not present, but I thought that I had installed it with Gapes service pack, is Gapes version of DUN 1.4 not detected by Auto-Patcher?

the one in Gape's pack is not the complete version (one of the components has been removed I forget which one), but it is still v1.4 so Auto-Patcher (AP) should still recognise that to some degree. I'll look further into harmonising this ...

About a third of the updates weren’t installed because it said that “a newer version of the update was detected” is this message correct? I don’t believe that I have so many newer updates than Auto-Patcher. Should the message say “ the same or newer version of the update was detected”?

To be precise, AP should be telling you that you have a more recent file, and that is why the hotfix won't be installed. Some hotfixes make other hotfixes obsolete even when they are not related to each other at all, except they share a similar file. Are you sure its "about a third"? Maybe write down the offending updates next time around and I'll look into it.

Kb905495 "started to loop thru installation and so was not installed again"

This was a known bug in v1.8 but v1.92 it should report that it was installed, and then found as installed. What you should do is post your log file when providing feedback, because that will telll much more of the story of what happened when you ran AP than you are telling me at present. Don't forget about the report function, it uses the same code as the installation routines so its a good way to know in advance what AP is going to do. Use CODEBOX to save space in your post ie CODEBOX text here /CODEBOX but with brackets around CODEBOX etc.

I then installed Auto-Patcher 1.92 and reran it, however no changes were made to my system, is this correct?

No, Kb905495 should have installed, then found as installed the next time around.

Thanks for posting your comments, awesome, much appreciated.

[DeadDude]

I'll throw my image of the 98SE autopatcher install back on the drive later tonight and check.

Well I lied...

No actually what happened is I found some of the drivers I've been looking for and thought I'd give installing them a quick spin to see if they'd fix some of the problems I've been having... no dice. I did a screen grab before I tossed my XP back on though, so here's your answer in the image I attached. And no, before you ask I have no idea how I managed to get such a high version number installed!

--iWindoze

Hey now... that *really* resembles the info I was pulling off my funky 98SE cdrom....

I am currently using a P166MMX with 32megs RAM (has a 32meg stick and a 16 meg stick, reports as 64megs ram... might have to pull the 16 out, the whole system is shaky with it)

I installed my 4.90.3000 98SE.... had an error in Browseui.dll, caused a loop of crashes... boot into safe mode, ran ap 1.6 and the error went away...

Is this browseui.dll error "common"? Any ideas? It did this *before* I added the suspect ram.... :gee:

[Drugwash]

I suspect you're mixing EDO RAM with FPM, which is something that many boards do not accept, although they claim they do. Better find similar type memory sticks, according to the mobo specifications.

4.90.3000 is Millenium version, not 98SE. There's something fishy going on, but I think this has been discussed already (if I'm not wrong).

No idea about the browseui.dll error - not related to Auto-Patcher, at least.

[DeadDude]

Drugwash-

can you elaborate on the RAM situation??? I've *never* heard of that.... FPM?

We did already discuss the messed up 98 cd... I'm testing it out with as many apps as I can run on this lappy...

the browseui.dll error was at least fixed by autopatcher... I don't remember if this error happens on all new installs with this CD I used or not... not important though, as methinks it is in the CD...

I was just wondering if anyone else had errors in browseui.dll...

Hmm... mixed ram types.... gotta look into that- thanks for the heads up!

[soporific]

... ran ap 1.6 and the error went away...

1.6 ????

I personally wouldn't use anything under v1.8 -- seriously, v1.6 is 2 versions before the one that I thought was accurate enough to release to the public. C'mon, v1.8 is on a reasonable server, go get it!

Edited February 14, 2007 by soporific

[bluecatfish]

Thanks sporoific for all the great work on AutoPatcher! I just used ver 1.8 with 1.91 update on a fresh install of Win98SE without any problems. After installing AP I ran Windows Update and it found 6 critical updates that needed to be installed, listed below. Is this normal?

Critical Updates:

KB916281

KB891711

Windows Share Level Password Update

Q323172

Security Update, May 19, 2000

Security Update, March 17, 2000

My system:

Nec Ready 120LT Laptop

Cyrix GX200MMX

128MB Ram

20GB Hitachi HDD

Thanks again for all the good work all of you have put into this project!

[soporific]

Thanks sporoific for all the great work on AutoPatcher! I just used ver 1.8 with 1.91 update on a fresh install of Win98SE without any problems. After installing AP I ran Windows Update and it found 6 critical updates that needed to be installed, listed below. Is this normal?<snip>

Yes it is. Unfortunately the entire suite of Windows 98 hotfixes as it stands now don't play well together. Without going to much into it (this has already been discussed at length - go back about 10-20 posts) these are false alarms. By all means install the updates but nothing of value is actually installed on your system, all that happens is that Windows Update forces the re-installation of some hotfixes that had their hotfix info changed in some way. Because you have files with higher version numbers, none of the system files contained in these hotfixes is actually installed, but the hotfix info is replaced where it was missing.

I will add this info to the readme.txt file so others aren't spooked. Or even better, provide a menu option to go to Windows Update with a short note about the false alarms. It'll be in the next version.

Edited February 17, 2007 by soporific

[bluecatfish]

I appreciate the info Soporific. Keep up the good work. Guys like you is what keeps a great OS like Win 98 alive!

[soporific]

just announcing that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel i've been in the last week or so while on another project, and so will resume work on AP soon.

MDGx has sorted thru MSs latest hotfix horror alerts and given us what we can use, so those will be in the next preview release due in about a week i'd say.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback, i will be going over it all and answering any queries i've missed.

[Eck]

Hi again!

Just reporting in with my latest run of Auto-Patcher. I'm in a long process of setting up a multi-boot with 98SE, XP, and Vista on one hard drive and OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 on a second hard drive. I've gotten through 98SE and XP at this point.

To avoid confusion I've not used any extended logical drives, preferring to let Partition Magic create 3 primary partitions and letting XP format the one C drive it sees when setting itself up. The others are hidden by PM. PM, in my experience, does not do a good job formatting NTFS partitions so that's why I have XP do that during setup.

I've given 98SE 40GB, XP 80GB, and Vista 128GB. Imagine my surprise when seeing that XP now only has 30GB free space after all my software basics and my music, picture, and emulator game roms are installed. Well, I've reduced the System Restore capacity to its minimum of 300MB so I guess that's about the best I can do. I had no idea my stuff took up all that space! I haven't even installed any games yet, except for those roms which take up about 7 GB. My mp3's take up about 17 GB.

I've yet to decide whether to install my old XP Home Edition on the Vista partition first and have my Vista clean install its upgrade from that or to use the recently discovered method of having the Vista Upgrade DVD upgrade itself by installing it twice. I never use the XP Home Edition anymore as I've gone Pro, but I'm still not sure what I want to do. I suppose either way works fine.

I'm sure I'm in for loads of fun figuring out how to manage the multi-boot scenerio I prefer. My way, Vista will only see itself so will not set up the multi-boot menu for me (I hope). PQBoot from each OS will set the active partition whenever I want to change OS's. My biggest wonder is what's going to happen when I install Linux to the other hard drive and what Grub is going to leave me with after setup. I think it's possible to manually setup Grub to boot the various Windows partitions from tinkering with Grub within YaST. Don't know. I've printed out plenty of guides though so I'll see if I can tinker things up properly. I know BootMagic can't handle Vista so I haven't even bothered installing that. I'll either use Grub or PQBoot.

OKAY! The Auto-Patcher results: Perfect, perfect, perfect! I absolutely love this thing and thank you for developing it. No problems using 98SE2ME and 98MP10 afterwards either. I did need to delete shelliconcache, reboot, then restore it from the Recycle Bin to get the new My Computer icon to show though. I toggled off all the MDGx stuff in Auto-Patcher and instead installed the full versions myself afterwards.

NO SURPRISE: I got the Error Loading Device IOS, real mode memory allocation failed after installing something. I renamed smartdrv.exe to smartdrvold.exe in safe mode and 98SE then booted up fine. Interestingly, when checking bootlog.pre I see that it has a line saying that load vxd: SMARTDRV.EXE was successful. What the heck is calling that to be loaded I have no clue. Apparently it eventually fails to load it successfully and so I get that IOS error. I promise that smartdrv.exe is not called by ANY startup option screen I know about. It's not in autoexec.bat, config.sys, msdos.sys, protical.ini, win.ini, or system.ini. There are no references to smartdrv.exe in the registry. But something on ANY of my 98SE installations thinks it needs to be loaded for Windows. I'm totally clueless.

[ShadeTreeLee]

The patching goes through without a hitch... my problem is I need to know what updates increases the Windows version number to what values?

Or, if there is a way to force Windows to report a particular version number, I think this by itself may allow me to use all the updates without HPJOBBER having issues.

The updates work great, the problem is HPJOBBER doesn't want to work properly for some reason when 98 is fully patched.

Thank you for pointing out the list at the beginning, but I need to find out how those updates change the version reported.

Eck nailed it. "No Microsoft Windows Updates change the version number of Windows with the exception of the long discontinued Microsoft Security Updates Cd. " So your only excuse is a corrupted registry since this version info is just a simple value in the registry here?

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]

"VersionNumber"="4.10.2222"

"SubVersionNumber"="B"

And this is the same text displayed by pressing Winkey and Pause. It is NOT used for much version testing and it doesn't alter the DOS ver report at all. Your HPJOBBER may be one of the very rare ones that actually does look at (/alter?) this key's value. 98 Gold gets an 'A' for a SubversionNumber after running the Security CD, just to add confusion to the issue I believe, unless anybody else really does know why? Before the Security CD is run, there is no SubVersionNumber entry or value at all.

------------------

soporific

Your trials at WinUP site are due to the erasing of the below key's value by the reinstallation of IE. I really don't know why they do it that way but the iewizard does it every time it fires up. This is the text one sees when clicking on Help/About in IE but with the title 'Update Versions:' instead of the key's name of 'MinorVersion'.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

"MinorVersion"=";SP2;Q890923;Q837009;q313829;Q891781;Q832894;Q823353;Q903235;"

This entry is from my 98se IE 5.50 SP2 machine, your mileage will vary of course. Most of the more recent updates used a custom update engine which directly writes the update's ID number to this key thus providing a record of it for the V4 WinUP scan. If the WinUp scan can't find the number in this key, then you get bugged to reinstall the update even when file version protection inherent in inf files has prevented your higher versioned files from being overwritten during the IE reinstall in the first place and your really don't need the f@#$n update at ALL. To WinUP's credit though, there is also a version test done on the critical update's files themselves so one should not be able to 'fake' their way out of a legitimate WinUP scan of their system by cheating in the registry by manually setting it with values similar to those shown above. But that's one way you can avoid the nag at WinUP site given the proper files are in place, even MS recommended doing just that in one or two cases very early in the V4 WinUP site's life.

The other way is to use the custom update engine with the proper inf file 'strings' section as per each update and let the original engine write the key as it is supposed to. You can spot these updates with Resource Hacker in the RCData section under RunProgram - "OEUPDATE.EXE" Q837009 for example, means that OEUPDATE.EXE is the install engine and a batch file can launch it just fine, I would extend the quotes past the Inf file number Q837009 in this case and also include the full drive and path in the quotes for good measure. This 'Original' method would then also pass the QFE test (maybe?) - which is, go to the Windows folder and double click on QFECheck.exe. Read it's report to find all manner of missing/wrong versioned files. Running updates can be a headache at times as even done fully and properly, QFECheck will show some bad files when they are OK. This was a recent reg 'fix file' posted in Computing.net forum, and it works good. MS needs better logic/script to scan with at WinUP site and they need to write these updates correctly in the first place, as this stuff below attests to, original update data is just plain wrong.

REGEDIT4

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Updates\W98\UPD908519]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Updates\W98\UPD908519]

@="Windows 98 KB908519 Update"

"C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM\\t2embed.dll"="5.0.2195.7073"

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Updates\W98\UPD918547]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Updates\W98\UPD918547]

@="Windows 98 KB918547 Update"

"C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM\\KB918547\\KB918547.EXE"="4.10.0.2224"

"C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM\\KB918547\\Q918547.dll"="4.10.0.2224"

Keep up the good work!

Lee

[dondwsmith]

hi I tried to download Version 1.8 from the link on page 1 of this thread that links to softpedia

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enh...dows-98SE.shtml

On this page I can only find the V 1.92 update.

I have searched for other programs by soporific but they list none.

Is there any other non-torrent download location?