Win98 won't boot.

This really was a win98 question, sorry. Win98 won't boot.

(I included a storage ng, because all the problems related to
partitioning. Does that make it relevant to that ng?)

The final question is:, Following the seemingly successful shrinking
of a partition, XP will boot fine from the MS dual boot, but win98SE
just says "C: not found. (Enter Abort, Retry, xomething, or Fxxxxx):"
What should I do? (I don't remember the exact message, but
you've all seen the part in parens.)



Part one of this is not very important, but maybe someone knows the
answer. And it sets the stage for PART TWO, which follows PART ONE:

PART ONE

All of a sudden, when I start XPSP3, a dos-style progress bar goes
very quickly -- looks like coming out of hibernate, but faster, takes
about a second, and I'm not coming out of hibernate -- across the
bottom of the screen, at the very start, right after I pick an OS from
the MS dual boot screen. Why? How do I make it go away? It seems
weird; how can such a thing happen?

I have always used MS dual boot with XP, since since I first installed
it 2 years ago.

This happened after:

1) I cloned both partitions on the harddrive to an matching partitions
on an external drive. . I have win98SE as partition 1 and winXP as
partition 2. I used XXCLone to back up each partition to separate
partitions on the ext disk. No problems after that.

2) Then because my XP partition is getting full and the 98 partition
had plenty of space, I used the latest version of Parted Magic or
GParted (I didn't realize they were different, and I have to check
which I was using. It ran from a boot CD) partition manager, 5.5 I
think, to shrink the 98 partition, but it had an error in the middle.
After that, booting gave me "NTLDR not present" (or something like
that). I had to slave this drive and install another master drive to
edit C partition boot.ini, plus I had to install NTLDR and Ntdetect.
I did all this, and then both OSes would boot, but that progress bar
was there for XP.

PART TWO

Then, instead of Parted or Gparted, I used Easeus Partition Master 6,
the latest version, to make the 98 partition smaller, leaving 16 gigs
of unallocated space in between, until after I test everything.
Well, XP booted just fine after this and it accessed many files from
the 98 partition, including executing a couple of them, but booting
win98SE just showed a black screen with a flashing underline in the
upper-left hand corner, that never went away.

I went back into XP, checked the boot.ini file and it hadn't changed.
XXClone has an option to make a disk bootable, so I tried the first
part, Write MBR. When I tried to boot 98, nothing had changed. Then
I went back and did the second part, Write Boot Sector, and after
that, it would go from the Dual Boot menu to the win98SE menu (which I
have it set up to always display) and I chose my usual, Boot with
logging. It ran config.sys and autoexec.bat, and then, where I
normally displayed the time before leaving dos to start win98, it gave
a message, "Time invalid". (I entered a time, which was there when
later I got to XP, but it didn't ask for a date, and the date was
still accurate in XP). Then the next message was "C: not found,
abort, retry, or Fxxx" When I tried F or Retry, I got the same
message again. When I tried A for abort, the computer turned off.

What do I do now? I want 98 to work still for several reasons.

For some reason, according to EaseUS run under winXP

Partition 1, the win98 partition is marked System and Primary.
Partition 2, the winXP partition is marked Boot.

Is that right?

Win98 is where 98 was first installed and where the boot.ini is. In
boot.ini, the default is to go to partition 2 and start XP.

I thought part 1 was the boot partition until it handed off to part 2.
Why does Easus regard part 2 as a boot partition? Is it because I'm
in XP already, and I'd get a different result if I booted from a
partition manager CD?

For some reason, trying to start Partition Magic 8 freezes the
computer at the flash screen, but this program is entirely on the XP
partition.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

mm wrote in
:

snip

Sorry, I am going crazy here for various unrelated reasons, so I
did not read ALL of your post, but:

1. NEVER *resize* your partitions, let alone when you have
different OS's installed. Think before you set up your hard
drive and set them up so you have room for future changes
WITHOUT having to resize partitions.

IOW, the time to decide what size the partitions should be is
when your drive has NOTHING ON IT.

2. If you have 98 /and/ other Win OS's, stick to FAT32 if you
have the option. Do not use NTFS, never mind the largely
bull**** "advantages" of it. I have been using FAT32 exclusively
for nearly 15 years and I have NEVER had a problem with ANYTHING
fs-related.

3. Before doing ANYTHING on a dual or multi-boot system, back up
the root of C and the MBR.

I had a similar problem and thought I was ****ed, but when I
overwrote the root of C: (including NTLDR and the other XP-dual-
boot-created files) with what I had backed up (in a rare
instance of accidental foresight), everything worked *perfectly*
after the reboot. I *was* amazed - but also relieved.

I can send/post the dual boot 98 and XP files, to which you can
make the adjustments to suit your system and then stick them in
the C: root. It might work.



--
"Anytime I hear the word "culture", I reach for my iPad."
- 21st Century Humanoid

On 9/26/2010 12:30, mm wrote:
This really was a win98 question, sorry. Win98 won't boot.

[snip]

Then, instead of Parted or Gparted, I used Easeus Partition Master 6,
the latest version, to make the 98 partition smaller, leaving 16 gigs
of unallocated space in between, until after I test everything.
Well, XP booted just fine after this and it accessed many files from
the 98 partition, including executing a couple of them, but booting
win98SE just showed a black screen with a flashing underline in the
upper-left hand corner, that never went away.

I went back into XP, checked the boot.ini file and it hadn't changed.
XXClone has an option to make a disk bootable, so I tried the first
part, Write MBR. When I tried to boot 98, nothing had changed. Then
I went back and did the second part, Write Boot Sector,

You may have mangled the 98 volume boot sector that XP installs for dual
boot configurations.

Boot to XP's recovery console and enter
fixboot C:

thanatoid wrote:
mm wrote in
:

snip

Sorry, I am going crazy here for various unrelated reasons, so I
did not read ALL of your post, but:

1. NEVER *resize* your partitions, let alone when you have
different OS's installed. Think before you set up your hard
drive and set them up so you have room for future changes
WITHOUT having to resize partitions.

Hindsight is always 20-20 for *all* of us.
Actually, one can successfully resize them with third party utilities. If
you think that's dangerous, try reflashing the BIOS, where you have to hope
and pray it will be successful - or you're hosed.

IOW, the time to decide what size the partitions should be is
when your drive has NOTHING ON IT.

2. If you have 98 /and/ other Win OS's, stick to FAT32 if you
have the option. Do not use NTFS, never mind the largely
bull**** "advantages" of it.

They aren't bull**** advantages. And at least XP has one other good thing
going for it - few - if any - blue screens. I sure couldn't get that on my
Win98SE system.

I have been using FAT32 exclusively
for nearly 15 years and I have NEVER had a problem with ANYTHING
fs-related.

Guess that makes it better than NTFS? :-)

Bill in Co wrote:

They aren't bull**** advantages. And at least XP has one other
good thing going for it - few - if any - blue screens. I sure
couldn't get that on my Win98SE system.

I don't know about you, but I run 98 daily at work and at home. I can't
remember the last time I got a blue screen on win-98.

If you actually do run win-98 on a frequent basis today, then tell us
something about the hardware it's installed on. What is the CPU? What
is the vintage of the motherboard and video card? How much installed
ram?

NTFS was created and given certain abilities for these reasons:

1) microsoft needed a file system that contained permission structures
that would allow various levels of access to individual files. Home and
soho users don't really need that ability, but they're stuck with it
because NT and it's derivatives are designed first and formost for
corporate / enterprise use.

2) NT and it's derivatives (2k, XP, etc) when used as servers requires a
file system that can handle multiple users accessing the same file, and
some files can be rather large (larger than 4 gb). NTFS was designed
with this ability in mind. Again, home and soho users don't need this.

3) hard drives of the early 1990's to the early 2000's had limited
on-board write buffers and limited or no ability to perform internal
bad-sector re-mapping, so the NTFS was given journalling capability and
bad-sector remapping capability, neither of which is needed today given
the built-in error handling capability of drives made during the past 7
or 8 years.

NTFS is proprietary and is not fully, publically documented. The
command and control structures of NTFS is distributed throughout the
drive space, making it hard to piece together if it has been corrupted.
FAT32's command and control structures are concentrated in specific
sectors of the drive, making recovery easier because file data is not
mixed in with those control structures. FAT32 is fully documented, and
there exists more software (free and paid) that can recover FAT32
drives.

One thing I do love about XP is the almost complete
absence of blue screens, in comparison to Win 98.

Windows 98 got a bad rap early in it's life because computers at the
time had very pathetic hardware. AGP was a new video bus format, and
there were lots of buggy drivers and even AGP hardware during the years
1998 - 2002. The amount of memory that systems had back then was a joke
(32 mb, 64 mb if you were lucky). Blue screens were common.

But if you are running 98 on at least a P-3 system with 256 mb of ram
and a motherboard made after 2002 (or ideally, a P-4 system with 512 mb
ram and a motherboard made after 2003) then you will see hardly any blue
screens.

The frequency with which you see a blue-screen under win-98 is, in my
experience, a function of the age of the system hardware and the amount
of installed memory - NOT anything inherent in the code of the OS
itself.

N8G wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:

They aren't bull**** advantages. And at least XP has one other
good thing going for it - few - if any - blue screens. I sure
couldn't get that on my Win98SE system.

I don't know about you, but I run 98 daily at work and at home. I can't
remember the last time I got a blue screen on win-98.

If you actually do run win-98 on a frequent basis today, then tell us
something about the hardware it's installed on. What is the CPU? What
is the vintage of the motherboard and video card? How much installed
ram?

I messed around with that system quite a bit, trying out various software
packages, etc, etc. But sure, if I hadn't done as much with it, and just
left it alone, with the existing apps or very few newer ones, I wouldn't
have gotten as many blue screens. It wasn't a daily occurence, but it
probably was an every other week occurence (after messing around with
various software). I still have that Win98SE system though, just as a
fallback.

My system was an older Dell 4100, which I finally upgraded to 512 MB of RAM.
The CPU was 800 MHz. All in all, it was a pretty good system, I think. I
just pushed it a bit with all my software tests. :-)

NTFS was created and given certain abilities for these reasons:

1) microsoft needed a file system that contained permission structures
that would allow various levels of access to individual files. Home and
soho users don't really need that ability, but they're stuck with it
because NT and it's derivatives are designed first and formost for
corporate / enterprise use.

2) NT and it's derivatives (2k, XP, etc) when used as servers requires a
file system that can handle multiple users accessing the same file, and
some files can be rather large (larger than 4 gb). NTFS was designed
with this ability in mind. Again, home and soho users don't need this.

What about the journaling, for better automatic file recovery when it
crashes?
Well, I see what you wrote below, but I don't think it's such a black and
white issue (meaning that NTFS buys nothing over FAT in that regard).

But if you're talking about the necessity of using some third party
utilities to try and recover some specific files, I can't say which would be
easier to recover. I haven't done any such A/B comparisons.

3) hard drives of the early 1990's to the early 2000's had limited
on-board write buffers and limited or no ability to perform internal
bad-sector re-mapping, so the NTFS was given journalling capability and
bad-sector remapping capability, neither of which is needed today given
the built-in error handling capability of drives made during the past 7
or 8 years.

NTFS is proprietary and is not fully, publically documented. The
command and control structures of NTFS is distributed throughout the
drive space, making it hard to piece together if it has been corrupted.
FAT32's command and control structures are concentrated in specific
sectors of the drive, making recovery easier because file data is not
mixed in with those control structures. FAT32 is fully documented, and
there exists more software (free and paid) that can recover FAT32
drives.

One thing I do love about XP is the almost complete
absence of blue screens, in comparison to Win 98.

Windows 98 got a bad rap early in it's life because computers at the
time had very pathetic hardware. AGP was a new video bus format, and
there were lots of buggy drivers and even AGP hardware during the years
1998 - 2002. The amount of memory that systems had back then was a joke
(32 mb, 64 mb if you were lucky). Blue screens were common.

But if you are running 98 on at least a P-3 system with 256 mb of ram
and a motherboard made after 2002 (or ideally, a P-4 system with 512 mb
ram and a motherboard made after 2003) then you will see hardly any blue
screens.

The frequency with which you see a blue-screen under win-98 is, in my
experience, a function of the age of the system hardware and the amount
of installed memory - NOT anything inherent in the code of the OS
itself.

"Bill in Co" wrote in
m:

thanatoid wrote:

snip

1. NEVER *resize* your partitions, let alone when you have
different OS's installed. Think before you set up your
hard drive and set them up so you have room for future
changes WITHOUT having to resize partitions.

Hindsight is always 20-20 for *all* of us.
Actually, one can successfully resize them with third party
utilities.

BION, I /have/ done it ONCE (with the last good version of
Partition Magic IIRC), but then had to fdisk and reformat
everything *anyway* because it did not "take", and caused
serious problems.

So I still say "plan ahead". Sometimes hindsight is the only
thing you can offer.

If you think that's dangerous

I /know/ it's dangerous, see above.

try reflashing
the BIOS, where you have to hope and pray it will be
successful - or you're hosed.

Piece of cake. I have done it several times - the first time I
DID have to wear several diapers.

Nothing bad happened, except I learned flashing the BIOS is
totally pointless. It made NO difference whatsoever, so I went
back to the originals, both times, on both machines I have done
it on.

IOW, the time to decide what size the partitions should be
is when your drive has NOTHING ON IT.

2. If you have 98 /and/ other Win OS's, stick to FAT32 if
you have the option. Do not use NTFS, never mind the
largely bull**** "advantages" of it.

They aren't bull**** advantages. And at least XP has one
other good thing going for it - few - if any - blue
screens. I sure couldn't get that on my Win98SE system.

I agree there are no BSOD's, but the insane design of XP and
constant "****! Why can't I do this the ***simple*** way" is a
million times more annoying than the occasional BSOD, which
happens rarely on a well tweaked system, and is easily taken
care of in about a minute with a reboot - and half the time a
reboot is not even necessary.

As for NTFS, it's not worth getting into, but I will say I have
YET to hear a truly convincing argument for its superiority, and
years ago when this group still had several MS MVP's in it, one
of them called NTFS "a fiasco". If THAT does not suggest a
problem, what does?

I have been using FAT32 exclusively
for nearly 15 years and I have NEVER had a problem with
ANYTHING fs-related.

Guess that makes it better than NTFS? :-)

See above, and the (admittedly rare, but STILL) posts from
people who lost all their data - because when NTFS blows up, it
REALLY blows up.


--
"Anytime I hear the word "culture", I reach for my iPad."
- 21st Century Humanoid

thanatoid wrote:
"Bill in Co" wrote in
m:

thanatoid wrote:

snip

1. NEVER *resize* your partitions, let alone when you have
different OS's installed. Think before you set up your
hard drive and set them up so you have room for future
changes WITHOUT having to resize partitions.

Hindsight is always 20-20 for *all* of us.
Actually, one can successfully resize them with third party utilities.

BION, I /have/ done it ONCE (with the last good version of
Partition Magic IIRC), but then had to fdisk and reformat
everything *anyway* because it did not "take", and caused
serious problems.

Well, you got burned. And didn't get burned by a BIOS update. I'm sure
some have gotten burned by both. So far, I've been lucky on both accounts.
:-)

So I still say "plan ahead". Sometimes hindsight is the only
thing you can offer.

If you think that's dangerous

I /know/ it's dangerous, see above.

try reflashing the BIOS, where you have to hope and pray it will be
successful - or you're hosed.

Piece of cake. I have done it several times - the first time I
DID have to wear several diapers.

Nothing bad happened, except I learned flashing the BIOS is
totally pointless. It made NO difference whatsoever, so I went
back to the originals, both times, on both machines I have done
it on.

But some others have had disatrous experiences (fortunately, not me on this
one)

IOW, the time to decide what size the partitions should be
is when your drive has NOTHING ON IT.

2. If you have 98 /and/ other Win OS's, stick to FAT32 if
you have the option. Do not use NTFS, never mind the
largely bull**** "advantages" of it.

They aren't bull**** advantages. And at least XP has one
other good thing going for it - few - if any - blue
screens. I sure couldn't get that on my Win98SE system.

I agree there are no BSOD's, but the insane design of XP and
constant "****! Why can't I do this the ***simple*** way" is a

Like WHAT??? I've got this XP machine pretty well customized to almost
(well, almost) match my 98SE one for most stuff. For example, I junked the
built in windows search, and that stupid default desktop, and several other
things, and installed ERUNT, which works like "scanreg /restore" in Win9x
systems for restoring the registry. This system IS very well tweaked -
about as well as my 9x system ever was.

million times more annoying than the occasional BSOD, which
happens rarely on a well tweaked system, and is easily taken
care of in about a minute with a reboot - and half the time a
reboot is not even necessary.

As for NTFS, it's not worth getting into, but I will say I have
YET to hear a truly convincing argument for its superiority, and
years ago when this group still had several MS MVP's in it, one
of them called NTFS "a fiasco". If THAT does not suggest a
problem, what does?

Lots of people say lots of things on different occasions, just like that
dimwit Glenn Beck does. That doesn't make it so.

I have been using FAT32 exclusively
for nearly 15 years and I have NEVER had a problem with
ANYTHING fs-related.

Guess that makes it better than NTFS? :-)

See above, and the (admittedly rare, but STILL) posts from
people who lost all their data - because when NTFS blows up, it
REALLY blows up.

Hasn't happened to me yet, and I've pushed this machine quite a bit, by
installing various software and messin around with the system and registry,
on occasions. I suspect the people that lost all their data (your NTFS
blows up" line above) were either a bit incompetent in what they were doing
at the time, or they had a disastrous hardware failure, which could be a
problem for ANY system.

unplug hard Drive ,..

On Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:54:57 -0400, Bill Blanton
wrote:

On 9/26/2010 12:30, mm wrote:
This really was a win98 question, sorry. Win98 won't boot.

[snip]

Then, instead of Parted or Gparted, I used Easeus Partition Master 6,
the latest version, to make the 98 partition smaller, leaving 16 gigs
of unallocated space in between, until after I test everything.
Well, XP booted just fine after this and it accessed many files from
the 98 partition, including executing a couple of them, but booting
win98SE just showed a black screen with a flashing underline in the
upper-left hand corner, that never went away.

I went back into XP, checked the boot.ini file and it hadn't changed.
XXClone has an option to make a disk bootable, so I tried the first
part, Write MBR. When I tried to boot 98, nothing had changed. Then
I went back and did the second part, Write Boot Sector,

You may have mangled the 98 volume boot sector that XP installs for dual
boot configurations.

Boot to XP's recovery console and enter
fixboot C:

Thanks.

First, if I made a win98, boot floppy, like several pieces of software
offer to do, would it include fixboot? OK, I didn't think so, but I
thought I should ask.

Especially because the rest of this quesiton is so long. I'm sorry
about that.

Because Ive been working on this, and it's not as easy as I hoped
First I have to install recovery console, and I haven't been able to
do that.

I took my XP installation CD and found winnt32.exe and ran it
y:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcon but I'm up to SP3 and my CD is SP0,
and it said it was older than the current version.

So I fouhnd SP3 on a CD, but it was just one .exe file.
Then I remembered I had expanded the .exe file and had all the files
in my external backup drive.

So I found the one for SP3 and ran it:
I:\win2000basement\xpsp3\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcon and I got the
message "The installation source path specified in Setup is invalid.
Contact your System Administrator."

So I googled this message, and

1) some places said it couldn't run from a flat file, which I think
means it has to be on a CD, is that right? So I copied the file and
2 winnt32 dll's and 2 winnt dll's to a CD and ran it from the CD and
got the same message.

2) Others said iiuc one had to slipstream sp3 to XP and then run that
(they all said sp2, because sp2 was the highest then, but shouldn't it
be enough to take winnt32.exe and maybe its .dll files out of SP3 and
run them?

3) One or two other places said that the problem could be solved in
the registry: http://forum.sysinternals.com/topic7290.html
"Temporarily change setup source path in the registry under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Setup
"SourcePath" value should point to c:\
(Re-create slipstreamed "i386" in c:\)
Backup previous key/data and reverse the process when done."

In keeping with this one, I went to that location in the registry and
my SourcePath was E:\, which until yesterday was the name of my second
CD drive. First I changed it to the address of my external drive,
where the files for SP3 were, all of the address that precedes i386\ .

That didn't work, so I copied the file to a C:\i386 folder, changed
the registry to C:\ and ran it. There it complained that it didnt'
have winnt32u.dll, so I copied all four dll files whose name started
winnt to the same C: folder. Then it went back to the previous
message about Source Path.

Then I figured that I should use D:, since that is the WinXP
partition, so I moved the folder to D: changed the registry to say D:\
and ran it from there.

Then I burned the CD and ran it from the CD in the second CD drive.
Didn't work so I went into the registry and changed the entry to Z:\ .
Didn't work so I moved the CD to the Y: drive and changed the entry to
Y:\ . That was the last thing I tried, and it gave the same message
"The installation source path specified in Setup is invalid. Contact
your System Administrator."

4) And one guy said all that was necessary was to copy winnt32.exe to
the C: parttion:
http://askbobrankin.com/comments_000400.php
"The Recovery Console CAN be installed after Windows XP Service Pack 2
[That would also include sp3.] has been installed. Basically, you must
temporarily replace the XPSP1 c:\i386\WINNT32.EXE file with the XPSP2
WINNT32.EXE file, then you run the "c:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons"
command. No other changes or Registry edits should be necessary. There
are step-by-step instructions on the following page:
Microsoft Windows XP FAQ - (21) Recovery Console SP2 Revision -
http://www.michaelstevenstec h.com/xpfaq.html#021 "
This url says "You will need to do one of the following.
1. If SP2 was applied as an update and the option to save the
uninstall files was enabled, Uninstall SP2 from Add/Remove.
2. If Windows XP SP2 was preinstalled or installed from XP media
with SP2 included, uninstall will not be an option. You will need to
clean install with an older XP version or use one of the options in 3
and 4 or 5. [There is no 5, but maybe he means the "work around
fix".]
3. Use a slipstreamed XP CD with SP2.
4. Use a retail/OEM XP SP2 CD when available."

"SP2 work around fix

Work around compliments of "Jon" from the msnews newsgroups.
You can install Recovery Console, AFTER SP2 installation, via the
following workaround.....

For this you need the full network version of SP2.

Downloadable from HERE. [This is the SP2 installer. I have SP3
already, and I did all the stuff below already.]

1. Open a command prompt in the folder containing the SP2 installer
and type
WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe -x
Choose a folder to extract the files to e.g. file:///c:/SP2files
2. Make a backup of the file winnt32.exe in c:\windows\i386
3. Replace the winnt32.exe file in c:\windows\i386 with the
identically named file in C:\sp2files\i386 (or in the i386 folder in
the folder where you extracted the files)
4. Open a command prompt at c:\windows\i386
Type winnt32.exe /cmdcons
Recovery Console should install

****I did this almost, I put the exe and 3 dlls that weren't already
there into D:\windows\system32 and I changed the registry entry to
match, but it didn't work. Surely it coudn't make a difference if it
were in C;\windows\i386 .

(Ignore the first error message, if any)
5. Replace the winnt32.exe in c:\windows\i386 with its original
version (created in step 2) Hope this works for you. Jon


So I have tried pretty much all of these (except making a slipstreamed
version, but I think I got the same files from SP3) and none work.
What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any help you can give.