Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:24:22 +0100 From: Philip Nienhuis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] When EZ-Drive is a >must< for W98 * W2K installations
Matt Hanson wrote: > > Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 01:47:49 -0800 (PST) > From: Matt Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: When EZ-Drive is a >must< for W98 * W2K installations I doubt that. > I need help recovering the ability to boot W2K. > > I've been having >all< kinds of FAT32 file system problems after finally I was wondering why we didn't hear from you for so long :-P > deciding to install W2K on a D: logical drive, and have it set up dual > booting with W98 on the primary C: partition. I know how you feel about > drive overlay Philip... but it appears that in order to deal with the long Oh don't worry, it's your Lib not mine ;-) > file and folder names I have for my MP3 library on my E: drive after the > 8GB boundary, I >have< to have EZ-Drive installed. > > I'll address that below, but at the top here, I need help recovering the > ability to boot W2K on D:. Because of problems with W98 not having drive > overlay installed, the C: partition files were blown apart attempting to > copy folders of MP3s from D: (before 8GB) to E: (after 8GB). Suddenly I > had no access to any programs in W98, and there were no folders or files in > \Program Files any more. Installing EZ-Drive brought back access to many > of them, but most were too corrupted to be of any use. > > Thing is that the boot files for W2K were on the root of the W98 C: > partition, and they were totally blown away. So I've restored a W98 image > to C:, but I need to repair W2K's boot data. People are telling me to run > the set of 4 W2K setup floppies, and run a repair process from there. But > I'm wondering if I can just run x:\i386\winnt from my E: partition, and > repair things from there. Anyone know if that will work? (don't forget to run \windows\smartdrv first) Yes that will work, and even faster than when booting from floppies. You'll end up in some menu where it says something like "repair a Windows 2000 installation", from then on it should be easy. BTW I just read John's post and I'm convinced he has some good suggestions there. Another issue is *how* you have formatted the FAT32 partions beyond 8 GB. I found I needed Win2K to do that, Win98 couldn't see the right partitions (or the partitions right) and I was afraid it (W98) would wreck the entire extended partition. Once Win2K had formatted all FAT32 partitions beyond 8 GB, W98 (and OS/2 / Linux / ....) could access and use them w/o any problems up till now, and that's over 6 months of heavy use. > Okay... Here's a list of problems that I've had relating to not having > EZ-Drive installed. And I'm convinced that my problems stemmed from having > >enormously< long file/folder names, as my nested MP3 folders were always > the 1st to have problems being read in W98: The limit is 256 chars for a file name. I don't know whether that includes the path name. But if you had an enormous amount of files with long path names, I'd rather think you've simply hit some internal limits for W98. I'm thinking of memory and virtual memory: e.g., when you are on a corporate network and try to access a network drive, Explorer may need something like 10-15 MB just to be able to show you the directory tree and a listing of files. Enormously long file names and path names simply add to this memory shortage. Same happens for a drive with a lot of files and deeply nested subdir structure. Now, if there's insufficient space for W98 to accommodate its growing swap file (which it needs to accomodate Explorer's memory hunger) , it'll start overwriting it's own memory and it wil soon crash and severy trash the file system. I've had this happen several times myself. > * The 1st clue was after many W98 crashes, Scandisk in windows (I skip the > slow DOS process) complained about broken file chains on E:. After > accepting an option to repair by deleting the files once, I aborted the > next problem it found, booted to W2K and ran Chkdsk there. But Chkdisk > found no problems with the file system on E: Do they (E: in W98 and E: in Win2K) refer to the same partition? Seriously, 1. If you had W98 format the >8GB partitions W98 may have referred to the wrong ones (~what I described above) or my have used wrong EMBR and/or boot sector entries and 2. Normally Win2K should, but might not, have assigned the same drive letters as W98. Remember, Win2K uses enumeration of all partitions, unlike W98, and afterwards you can change any drive letter you want. > * Many file & folder names on E: >8GB showed up in W98 as program > characters, and Scandisk would want to delete them, and save the data in > chk files. Happened to me several times: subdirs were converted to regular files :-( > * Related to above, I managed to resolve some problems with 'corrupted' > filenames in W98 that W2K saw fine by creating a new folder in W2K, coping > the files in it to the new folder, deleting the old folder, and renaming > this new folder to match the old. Booting into W98, the file names > appeared properly. This is before I discovered that drive overlay fixed > all these problems. > > * Winamp was taking an hour or more to load MP3s on E: to its library from > the W98 C: installation. After installing EZ-Drive (and reinstalling > Winamp in the original copy of W98), it only took a couple minutes to load > the MP3s into the library. > > * While playing MP3s on E: in Winamp, I could hardly multitask, and > couldn't without the audio breaking up. With DO, no problem. > > * Ghost >definitely< needs EZ-Drive. That's how I came to the final > conclusion DO might have been at the root of the problems with my FAT32 > file system in the past couple weeks. I restored a W98 image to C: without > DO installed, and W98 complained at boot about missing files listed in > system.ini, and only a few of the programs worked after boot. With DO > installed, the restored image ran fine. It sounds like your W98 has been trashed somehow. Are you sure your HD (especially cyl.# 0, track#0 (= where the MBR resides) is still OK? this is a vital piece of HD space for a HD....... > But now to repairing access to W2K??? Just run \windows\smartdrv (the win98 \windows, that is) \i386\winnt.exe and proceed from there. Or boot from the Win2K recovery floppies and do a fixmbr and/or fixboot > > Matt > Good luck, Philip
