[Multibooter]

Dave-H, on Oct 29 2009, 09:43 AM, said:

However if I put either of my multi-card readers into Windows 98, the same thing happens as before. The first drive seems to mount correctly, but as soon as the second drive mounts the system freezes.

Try to connect an external 5V power supply to your multicard reader. Possibly when a 2nd drive mounts, the current used is > 500mA on a single USB port. Multi-card readers work on my old laptop only with an external power supply. If you cannot connect a power supply to your multi-card reader, try to use the multi-card reader via an external USB hub with its own power supply.

Make sure the power supply plugs have the correct polarity, otherwise you may damage your hardware.

My favorite card-reader is a MSI multi-card reader. The only problem it has is when I power up my old Inspiron laptop with the card-reader connected, the MSI card-reader will not get a drive letter, even if the nusb safely-remove icon displays a Disk drive, without a drive letter. When I connect the MSI multi-card reader after Win98 or WinXP is up, it is recognized fine. This MSI multi-card reader works fine when connected at power-on to a new Asus Eee 1000HE, so possibly only old computers may have a power supply issue, but not new computers.

Some multi-card readers work only with 1 card inserted at a time, and stop working when 2 or more cards are inserted at the same time, regardless of the power supply. Other multi-card readers work fine with multiple cards at the same time, but not with an SDHC card and a micro-SDHC card inserted at the same time.

The product description page of my favorite card reader has changed, it's now here. I don't know whether the chip inside is still the same, those card readers I bought a year ago had a red LED, this one here has a blue LED, but the card readers have the same product number. BTW, MSI has marked in red letters on that page that there is a Win98SE driver for this card reader

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 29 October 2009 - 11:44 PM

[jaclaz]

Dave-H, on Oct 29 2009, 11:07 PM, said:

The integral USB stick, with its own driver, now installs in Windows 98 exactly as it does in Windows 2000.

That is to say, it appears as two separate drives, but inaccessible.
Windows 2000 says they have an unknown file system on them, Windows 98 says they have a FAT file system on them, but they are shown as being of zero size and cannot be formatted.

The point I'm getting to is that Windows 98 now treats the stick exactly the same way as Windows 2000, therefore it is extremely unlikely that any registry corruption in Windows 2000 is causing the problem, unless exactly the same condition now exists in Windows 98.

Good , and bad news at the same time, but at least now we know that nothing is wrong with the 2K.

Dave-H, on Oct 29 2009, 11:07 PM, said:

I think the stick itself is damaged in that it now contains storage space but with no storage volumes on it.
To repair it we need to restore the volume information.

That's more or less what has been discussed here in the last few days: Good morning, Mr de La Palice. :
http://en.wikipedia....es_de_La_Palice

Dave-H, on Oct 29 2009, 11:07 PM, said:

I did find a copy of the security program for the stick. Fortunately I had kept another copy in addition to the one on the stick itself. It allows you to lock and unlock the stick with password protection, and change the relative size of the "public" and "protected" sections of the stick.
Unfortunately it doesn't now work to repair the stick.
It runs OK and you can tell it to change the sizes, a progress bar goes across and it says "writing files" which looks very hopeful (the light on the stick even flashes!) but after it's finished in Windows 2000 the stick is no different.

Now, do you think I would have advised you to try using the Manufacturer Tool if I thought you could get away with the "plain" security app?

OF COURSE the security program WON'T work to restore it.

jaclaz

[Dave-H]

OK, I downloaded the Phison MPTool MP2232 1.11.0.
Is that the one to try first?
You'll have to guide me through how to use it, I'm a bit out of my depth here!

[jaclaz]

Dave-H, on Oct 30 2009, 01:15 PM, said:

OK, I downloaded the Phison MPTool MP2232 1.11.0.
Is that the one to try first?
You'll have to guide me through how to use it, I'm a bit out of my depth here!

That's the tricky part , most probably (read as "undoubtedly" ) won't work "right" if a Phison device is not detected, thus I simply cannot help you "specifically" (in the sense I cannot replicate locally).


Nor I have an "indirect experience" with it as another used:
http://www.msfn.org/board/do-split-my-usb-...pid-887182.html
abandoned the game long before getting into the "action" part of it.

BUT there is a manual for those around:
http://www.flashboot.ru/uploads/files/publ..._UserManual.rar

I guess that you want to try re-programming it to mode 3 or mode 8.

Only recommendation I can make is: print the manual, see if it makes sense, re-read it, and then again, BEFORE attempting flashing the thingy.

Ask if you have any doubts BEFORE flashing.

jaclaz

[Dave-H]

Well thanks to you guys, especially jaclaz, I've fixed by pen drive!

I used a package I downloaded from here -
http://depositfiles....files/dd0oeig46

This included the USB 2K REL90 program jaclaz referred to, as well as a lot of other related programs (including Chip Genius).
I don't think that they are all the latest versions of the programs, but they work, and the USB 2K REL90 program fixed things for me.

I did try using the separately downloaded Phison MPTool MP2232, but I couldn't get my head around that.
It seemed to need device information data files from Phison, which I didn't have of course.

I managed to get the pen drive to work as a single 2GB drive, and then just for the hell of it I thought I would try and restore it back to as it was originally (mode 7).
This I did, so it's now back exactly as it was before, but with my own personalised device ID!
Works perfectly in Windows 2000 and Windows 98 (with its own driver).

That has been a very useful exercise, and has taught me an awful lot, although obviously it's not particularly relevant to the original problem!

So, the original problem..........

I now have Windows 98 back as far as it's possible to do to the way it was before I first installed NUSB.
So, where do i go from here?
I'd still like to have NUSB on the system, but I need to know how to best avoid the same thing happening again as happened before.

[dencorso]

Hi, Dave!
I'm glad you've solved it! :

When jaclaz began participating in this thread I was confident we'd solve the pendrive issue, because, he's the best at it. And at many other difficult and obscure matters, too. jaclaz rocks!
But I think you might describe in a little more detail how to recover the pendrive, just for the record.

Now, if I'm not mistaken, two issues remain: to get your sound in 98 back to working condition and get nusb working in your system, without removing the manufacturer's drivers for the Phison pendrive and for the card-reader, isn't that so?

Well, before we begin any other procedure I recommend full backups of both the system partitions. This is the best backup procedure I can think of. I wrote about imaging software above, so I'll just quote it below:

dencorso, on Oct 26 2009, 04:10 PM, said:

There are numerous free options, that IcemanND has collected in his list of Disk Imaging Software. Now, in what regards commercial software, there is Norton Ghost 2003, which may still be be found new at eBay for about $50. It does rock! I'm a longtime user, and own one licence of NG 2003. For most purposes, NG 2003 is good enough and it's still the easier to get version of Ghost. But then, suddenly, Symantec decided that another software altogether would be best for their home clients and began marketing it as "Norton Ghost", although it's a totally different animal (those are versions 9, 10 and 12-14) and it sucks.

In any case I'm positive you'd be in a much safer position by having one of them and mastering its use. The main advantage is that you make a known-good image, burn it to a DVD, and then you can mess-up your system partition seven-ways-to-Sunday many times in a single day, and every time just fall back to the good image in about 20 minutes, and be ready to start again experimenting.

That said, I think Multibooter can be of great help with setting nusb alongside with other drivers. He's got much more experience than I do in this type of setup. But I sure will remain participating in this thread and contributing to it as far as I can.

[herbalist]

Dave-H
Instead of working with registry restores and worrying about corrupting your existing setup, You might consider using TestRun. It's a collection of batch files that copy your registry and allow you to experiment on a duplicate. If you totally wreck your registry, it's simple to get back to where you started from. It's useful for the type of experimenting that you're doing, test installs, etc. I've uploaded it here.
http://www.mediafire.com/?5mtuz1zrcyy

Rick

[jaclaz]

Dave-H, on Oct 31 2009, 02:41 PM, said:

Well thanks to you guys, especially jaclaz, I've fixed by pen drive!

Only too happy to have contributed to make a happy bunny :
http://www.msfn.org/board/cant-access-repa...27-page-10.html

dencorso, on Oct 31 2009, 04:15 PM, said:

When jaclaz began participating in this thread I was confident we'd solve the pendrive issue, because, he's the best at it. And at many other difficult and obscure matters, too. jaclaz rocks!

I just try and take these seriously:

Ray Bradbury said:

Life is "trying things to see if they work"

Kahlil Gibran said:

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

I did not solve anything, I simply pushed a bit Dave-H, luckily enough in the right direction....



jaclaz

[Dave-H]

OK, I'd like to get my sound working again before we go any further.
I want to start with NUSB again with a completely working system.

I have backed up my Windows 98 and Windows 2000 folders, and their Program Files folders, onto a removable hard drive, so I hope I'm covered in case of disaster.

The problem with the sound suddenly appeared while I was trying to troubleshoot the original NUSB installation.
I became aware that the sound was not working, but all seemed OK in Device Manager at that time, so I thought I would carry on with the troubleshooting and investigate the loss of sound later.

I then later became aware that there was a problem showing in Device Manager, but i don't know at what point it appeared.

The sound hardware (Realtek AC'97 Audio) is showing a yellow exclamation mark.

The general properties show -
"The NTKERN.VXD, MMDEVLDR.VXD device loader(s) for this device could not load the device driver. (Code 2.)
To fix this, click Update Driver to update the device driver".

Needless to say, I've done that until I'm blue in the face and it makes absolutely no difference!
I'm using the latest driver (4.06) and the driver installation appears to go without any problems.

More puzzling, the Resources tab shows -
"The resources this device is using do not match any of its known configurations. To assign resources manually for this device, click Set Configuration Manually."

If I click to set the resources, there are no conflicts shown, but the device is shown as using Interrupt Request "00". which is surely not correct. I'm pretty sure that it used to be using IRQ 11.
Needless to say, if I try and change it, all I get is "This resource setting cannot be modified"!

Everything else on the system seems to be functioning correctly except the sound.

The only other clue I've had is by using a utility called "HP System Diagnostics", which came with my HP printer.
This has a function to analyse the devices registered by the system, and you can delete any that you want to (presumably the same as you would by going into Safe Mode.)

This shows eight "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" devices.
I think this is one each for the five PCI card slots, plus the AGP slot and the ethernet and sound controllers, which are part of the motherboard.
One of them is shown as being disabled, and I'll bet it's the one for the sound hardware!

The question is, how do I enable it?
It doesn't show up in Device Manager, as presumably it's a hidden device, and unlike the Windows 2000 Device Manager, there seems to be no way in Windows 98 of getting Device Manager to show hidden devices.

So, any suggestions?
Thanks in anticipation.

[dencorso]

The way to unhide hidden devices in 98 is by going into safe mode. Do it, and delete *all* sound related drivers that show up. Then reboot into normal mode and install the sound card software using the manufacturer's setup program, not the update drive option, which, BTW, at this point, should not be available to you anymore, if you really removed all existing sound drivers to begin with. It may be necessary to reboot into safe mode more than once, to be able to rid the system from *all* sound drivers, before you can return to normal mode and install the drivers with the manufacturer's installer. Good luck!

[Dave-H]

Thanks Den.
I had already tried that before, removing the sound driver and letting the plug and play system reinstall it, but it never made any difference.
I will try removing the sound driver software this time first before I do it, and that will probably make the system unable to find a driver for the sound hardware, unless there is a generic Microsoft driver for it.
Then I'll reinstall the Realtek package and see what happens.
I'll report back in a while, I'm off to bed (it's one o'clock in the morning here!)

[Multibooter]

Dave-H, on Oct 31 2009, 03:40 PM, said:

OK, I'd like to get my sound working again before we go any further. I want to start with NUSB again with a completely working system.

Yes. nusb must be installed upon a clean base. This may take a little while.

I went against the recommendation of Maximus Decim and have not removed the USB 2.0 controllers before installing nusb. Removing the USB 2.0 controllers would also have meant uninstalling the driver and setup for my HP2605dn color-duplex USB network printer, which was just as complicated to install as nusb. I am using Orangeware v2.4.1 for all USB 2.0 PCCards and USB 2.0 hubs. I am not aware of any problems caused by continuing with the existing USB 2.0 controllers.

If you want to use nusb for some devices and manufacturer-provided drivers for other USB 2.0 mass storage devices (incl. USB HDD, USB DVD drives, USB HDD docking stations), you have to:
1) uninstall all manufacturer-provided USB 2.0 mass storage drivers (check Add/Remove)
2) install nusb on a clean base
3) de-activate nusb
4) re-install the manufacturer-provided driver
5) detect the new device with the manufacturer-provided driver on ALL USB connectors
6) activate nusb again

Each manufacturer-provided driver may add its own safely-remove icon to the system tray. The safely-remove icon of nusb is really amazing, it even works with a SCSI Jaz-drive connected to an Adaptec 1460 SCSI PCMCIA card: after safely removing the SCSI Jaz drive via the nusb icon, I can pull the Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card, to which the SCSI Jaz drive is connected, out of the laptop, and everything continues to work fine, even ScanDisk! This means that before installing nusb you may have to uninstall also old SCSI stuff ...

About 2 months ago, after I had test-installed Iosys98.exe plus Q277628.exe together, which shouldn't be done, a single Jaz drive appeared with SEVEN drive letters and icons in My Computer, maybe because I hadn't uninstalled the drivers for my SCSI PCCards/PCMCIA Cards, or some other SCSI devices, before installing nusb.

Before I installed nusb, I installed Driver Magician. By having Driver Magician back up all drivers (incl.MS), I got a list of the drivers installed on my system, to make sure I didn't forget to remove something before installing nusb. During the house-cleaning before installing nusb, I removed old Netscape Communicator 4.80, which was quite a task. BTW, the instability problem of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 on my system disappeared after removing Netscape.

Looking back at the amount of time I spent preparing a clean base for installing nusb, I might just as well have created another opsys selection in my boot menu and installed a 2nd, fresh new Win98 opsys, with nusb installed from the start, in addition to the original Win98 opsys with manufacturer-provided drivers.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 31 October 2009 - 09:07 PM

[jaclaz]

I will throw on the table one of my usual semi-random ideas.

Sure NUSB is great , but it is "complex" , installing it properly is a nightmare .

Maybe a simpler solution for the USB Mass Storage may work:
http://www.msfn.org/board/generic-98-usb-d...rks-t99220.html

jaclaz

[herbalist]

As far as I can tell, how well NUSB works is very hardware dependent. On my HP Pavilion with a Stratitec USB card, both NUSB and Orangeware drivers work great. On my Gateway 2000 which has a different USB card (I forget the brand) that uses native drivers, it doesn't work well at all. I just purchased a couple of flash drives (a 2GB Sandisk U3 and an HP 4GB) and a 4 port USB hub. On the HP, I can plug both flash drives, my external hard drive and a USB mouse into the hub, and after the normal driver detection and installing, I can move data from one USB device to another with no problems. On the Gateway, trying to copy or execute files on the external drive caused blue screens, "unable to write data" errors. It could not consistently detect the flash drives when I plugged them in. If I unplug a flash drive, then plug it back in, the Gateway PC rarely detects it again unless I reboot. On the HP, I can add and remove them at will. Oddly enough, the external hard drive isn't visible in "unplug or eject hardware" on the HP, but it is on the Gateway.

On the HP, USB devices work equally well with 98FE, 98SE, and 2K. On the Gateway, 98FE and SE both work poorly. Haven't tried 2K on it yet. I'd need to swap the USB cards between the 2 to determine if it's the cards or the PCs hardware that's the limiting factor. That's a bigger job than I have time to do right now. For now, I'm going to try a DOS CD that has USB drivers. It works well on the HP with the external hard drive. Haven't tried it with the hub or flash drives. Except for the BIOS, it will remove the OSs and drivers from the equation and allow me to determine if the hardware is the primary limiting factor on the Gateway.

[dencorso]

The thread pointed to by jaclaz is quite informative and merits careful reading and reflection. So, to add even some more info I take this opportunity to quote one of my older posts, that I thing is relevant here:

dencorso, on Jul 3 2009, 04:01 AM, said:

In case NUSB 3.3 doesn't work for you (but did you give it a try?), you have the Wintricks driver pack (the download link is on page #6) or RLoew's pack (the download link is on the Prerelease and Beta Software page), both free and both derived from the same Lexar drives. And there is the Win 2k USB 2.0 drivers for 9x/ME (direct download). I'd install USB 3.3 and if it gave me grief, just uninstall its (Win ME) USB 2.0 drivers from the Add/Remove software dialog and then add the Win 2k drivers. If that also doesn't work I'd restore a previously saved full system image to remove all traces of this installation and install one of the lexar derived drivers with the Win 2k USB 2.0 stack. Only if even that doesn't work I'd then just use either NUSB 3.3 without the USB 2.0 stack or one of the Lexar derived drivers stand alone. But without a USB 2.0 stack USB is not very useful, is it?

In any case, Dave-H's Supermicro X5DAE USB sub-system is based on a Intel ICH-4 southbridge, which shouldn't have problems with either USB 2.0 stacks mentioned above. So, I'm sure whatever problems there currently are must be fully software-related, and so, that a good tweaking and experimenting is all that is needed to have everything working as it should.

[Dave-H]

Well, I've just spent a frustrating afternoon trawling the web for information about IRQ steering problems in Windows 98.
I'm still trying to get my sound hardware to work again before I even think of going any further with NUSB!
Didn't actually get very far.

It does appear to be an IRQ allocation problem, but I can't think why it should have suddenly happened, or how to resolve it. If only I had some old copies of system.dat and user.dat..............


I'm sure that the key to solving the sound problem lies in finding out why one of the "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" devices is disabled. I've tried removing and reinstalling the sound drivers, and removing the relevant system devices and letting the system reinstall them, and it always comes back the same.

I do have one clue, which I should have mentioned straight away. While I was trying to resolve the system freezes I was getting with my multi-drive USB stick and card readers, I rebooted at one point and found that my system BIOS seemed to have reset itself to its defaults for some reason, and I had to go though the BIOS settings and put them back as they should be.
Is it possible that some setting has become corrupted that isn't manually correctable?
I've been though the settings umpteen times and I can't see anything wrong, and I'm pretty sure that all the settings are as they were before the problem occurred.
There are no settings in the BIOS that directly relate to the sound hardware, and the sound does work perfectly in Windows 2000 so I had been assuming that there couldn't be an actual hardware or BIOS problem.

The PCI bus IRQ steering settings are all at the defaults, as they have always been.
I tried switching IRQ steering off, and what happened was that the sound harware is now shown as having sensible resource settings (but still can't load the device drivers) and my Intel on-board ethernet card was disabled, saying that it needed IRQ steering on to work!
Putting it on again just put things back as they were before.

I hate hardware resource problems like this........

[Multibooter]

herbalist, on Nov 1 2009, 07:57 AM, said:

On my HP Pavilion with a Stratitec USB card, both NUSB and Orangeware drivers work great... Oddly enough, the external hard drive isn't visible in "unplug or eject hardware" [=safely-remove icon in System Tray] on the HP, but it is on the Gateway.

Hi herbalist, as I was saying to Dave in posting #2:

Multibooter, on Oct 20 2009, 06:00 PM, said:

Your system has most likely become a little corrupted and all your other USB and SCSI devices may be impacted.

herbalist, on Nov 1 2009, 07:57 AM, said:

On the HP, I can plug both flash drives, my external hard drive and a USB mouse into the hub, and after the normal driver detection and installing, I can move data from one USB device to another with no problems. On the Gateway, trying to copy or execute files on the external drive caused blue screens, "unable to write data" errors.

On my old Inspiron laptop I have trouble copying between 2 attached USB multipartition 1TB HDDs. I can copy/move little amounts of data Ok between the 2 USB HDDs, but copying/moving maybe > 50MB of data causes sometimes a frozen system and minor repairable disk corruption on the partition of the target HDD, when moving files then also sometimes on the source HDD. The same happens under WinXP and when copying/moving files with Beyond Compare instead of with Win98Se/WinXP Explorer. Maybe because of the old PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 of 1998, but there was also once a similar problem on my desktop with a more recent BIOS.

My workaround is not to transfer data directly between 2 USB mass storage devices (even between a USB DVD-Drive and a USB HDD!), but indirectly via the internal HDD. I try to avoid as much as possible to have two 1TB USB HDDs connected at the same time,

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 01 November 2009 - 03:05 PM

[herbalist]

Quote

I do have one clue, which I should have mentioned straight away. While I was trying to resolve the system freezes I was getting with my multi-drive USB stick and card readers, I rebooted at one point and found that my system BIOS seemed to have reset itself to its defaults for some reason, and I had to go though the BIOS settings and put them back as they should be.

How old is the battery?

[dencorso]

You may have the solution at your hands, Dave...
Remember you said:

Dave-H, on Oct 26 2009, 05:04 PM, said:

Yes, I still have those backups of the Windows 98 registry from the install.
I do have Norton Utilities (2002) and did make a Rescue Disk set, so I'll have that too.
They are ancient though!
I'd have to reinstall every single thing on the system, and that doesn't bear thinking about.

OK, then make another full backup of the present state of your 98 boot partition.
Then manually, from DOS, substitute system.dat and user.dat by the ones in your recue disk.
Reboot.
Lots of things won't work anymore, but probably your sound will work ok. Test it.
In case it's ok, go to the device manager and copy the setings it has for the sound card.
Then manually, from DOS, restore the up-to-date system.dat and user.dat.
Reboot.
Enter Device Manager and use the manual configuration to put in place the correct settings for the sound card.
Reboot.
Hunt for conflicts at the Device Manager.
That should be it. Good luck!

[Multibooter]

jaclaz, on Nov 1 2009, 01:08 AM, said:

Sure NUSB is great , but it is "complex" , installing it properly is a nightmare

Yes. I have installed nusb on my old Inspiron laptop, but not yet on my dual-core desktop, for the reason dencorso just indicated:

dencorso, on Nov 1 2009, 09:09 AM, said:

Dave-H's Supermicro X5DAE USB sub-system is based on a Intel ICH-4 southbridge, which shouldn't have problems with either USB 2.0 stacks mentioned above.

My dual-core desktop, in contrast to Dave's computer, has an ICH-5 (Intel 865G on an Asus P5PE-VM motherboard). It requires a special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver (v1.1.0.2 of 1-Apr-2003) for the ICH-5 USB 2.0 controller.

Maximus Decim has urged removing all USB 2.0 controllers, but I don't know whether nusb is able to handle ICH-5 on Intel 865G. Installing nusb on my old laptop, without uninstalling the OrangeWare driver v2.4.1 before, was also a test of whether nusb would run Ok on top of a pre-existing OrangeWare driver. Eventually I plan to install nusb also on my desktop with more recent hardware, on top of the special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver for the ICH-5.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 01 November 2009 - 04:20 PM