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 need help recovering the ability to boot W2K. I've been having >all< kinds of FAT32 file system problems after finally 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 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? 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 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: * 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. * 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. But now to repairing access to W2K??? Matt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
