Win 98 SE on new hardware - no go

[thraxed]

Usually like around 110 for that, or combo a Usb2sata adapter with sata2scsi adaptar, would probably be cheaper.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Usually like around 110 for that, or combo a Usb2sata adapter with sata2scsi adaptar, would probably be cheaper.

You can buy IDE to SCSI adapters for $10-15, they come from Yamaha CD players and use 50 pin connectors, 40MB/s max. Apart from there SATA to SCSI is extremely expensive and basically not worth it. If you know of some affordable U160/320 solution I'd love to know

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I know there was an update to Windows 98 that enabled USB support but I'm not sure it will support plug n' play storage like your USB sticks/card readers are.

 

[Deleted member 3]

98 has USB support, just not USB 2.0. Storage devices will work fine, though slow.

 

[twilyth]

Man, I forgot how much of a pain in my fucking ass the POS tape drive is. If you run it for more than a couple hours it goes completely squirrelly. 'Tape? What tape? That was a BLT and I don't understand the "bacon" protocol.'

Yeah, this is going take a lllooooooonnnngggg time - like male porno star 'long'.

On the bright side, I managed to get an external drive working. The first one turned out to be a 300GB western dig. I even managed to find the original install CD for the external case. The drivers installed, but Windows still couldn't see the drive. It knew something was there since the USB plug and play sequence worked, but couldn't see it in Windows explorer. I guess size does matter. Hehehe.

I also found out that there don't seem to be any pdf readers that work with Win98. I even managed to find a copy of Acrobat Reader version 5.x, but that wouldn't even install. I have all the software I used to use on backups, but it's not worth the trouble.

So far, I've erased one TR5 tape. I started getting errors on the next one and when I got the same errors on a third tape I remembered how things go with this tape drive.

Dan: I searched for IDE-SCSI adapters but didn't find anything in the price range mentioned. It's not a big deal, but if you could point me in the right direction, for $15-20, it would be well worth it. Thanks.

 

[Polarman]

I suggest you check out this forum for Win98 related hardware.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=107001

 

[jagd]

Are you looking from scsi to ide converter ?Or from ide to scsi converter ?Found one scsi to ide adapter on ebay for 19.99$ at a fast search ,take a look

 

[Deleted member 3]

I can check for some SCSI controller tomorrw if you want, I might have an old one around which can probably be shipped in an envelope in that price range. Of course I can check if it's compatible with Win2k/XP.

 

[twilyth]

Are you looking from scsi to ide converter ?Or from ide to scsi converter ?Found one scsi to ide adapter on ebay for 19.99$ at a fast search ,take a look

could you post a link?

I would need a cable that would plug into either a mobo SATA or IDE block on one end and have a 50 pin wide SCSI connector on the other end. E-SATA to 50-pin compact/high-density or Centronics would also work.

What search strings are you guys using to find this stuff? My search kung fu must be weak sauce.

I can check for some SCSI controller tomorrw if you want, I might have an old one around which can probably be shipped in an envelope in that price range. Of course I can check if it's compatible with Win2k/XP.

Hmmm. I don't know. Don't go to any trouble. I'm getting by ok right now.

The main issue is the 2 drives - yes there are actually 2 - one for the TR4's (4/8 gig) and one for the TR5's (10/20 gig). The TR5 guy can (in theory) read the TR4 tapes but can't write to them. So I have them in separate external cases and daisy chained to the controller (with a passive termination adapter on the last drive).

Right now, the TR5 is being a particularly bitchy little bitch-face. Every TR5 tape it seems has already been initialized - except for the one I erased yesterday. But I don't know if they were security erased. When I try to do that, every other tape is giving me an error saying that the tape is damaged. But I know that's bullshit. Unless they're sneaking out to the bar at night, they should be nearly pristine.

As it turns out though, once again I was hallucinating. Almost all of the tapes are TR4's - about 20 maybe. There only seem to be 5-10 TR5's. Although I may have stashed some of them someplace and I just don't remember - wouldn't be the first time.

The TR4 drive seems to be working much better than it's buddy. So I'm going to focus on those for now.

 

[twilyth]

I suggest you check out this forum for Win98 related hardware.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=107001

Almost forgot - thanks for the link!

 

[jagd]

here the link http://cgi.ebay.com/SCSI-To-IDE-BRI...trkparms=65:12|66:2|39:1|72:1234|293:1|294:50

 

[twilyth]

I must have pissed off somebody with some real metaphysical juice, because I just can't win. Somewhere there is a stuffed rag sewn to look like a computer case and there are more needles in it than Keith Richards on a bender.

It turns out that my memory sucks even worse than I had . . . uh . . . remembered. There's an amusing turn of phrase in there someplace, but I don't have the patience to go on a treasure hunt to find it.

It seems that when I was using these tapes, I was also using Windows 95, not Win98SE. The reason I stopped using tapes was because writable DVD's became available and the cost per 4.7G DVD was less than half of what a 10G tape cost - or at least close anyway. The increased convenience and reliability would also have been considerations.

This wasn't a big deal for the straight backup software, but not all of the tapes used that. For a couple years, Seagate had a product they called "Direct Tape Access". It let you use the tape as a hard drive. You could even drag and drop stuff. If you didn't know any better and tried to use it like a disk drive, don't plan on going anywhere for a few years. But if you understood the limitations, it was nice being able to back up several gig and then just write a couple files when you needed to update rather than redoing the entire tape. I know you can do incremental and differential backups, but there's something to be said for having everything on one tape and being able to do updates on the fly.

After futzing with a 3 tape backup for a few days and getting almost all of it (last tape had some problems), I figured I would check out one of the DTA tapes. Again, being a pack rat came in handy as I was able to find both versions of the software on old CD backups. But neither worked. I finally realized - still not sure how - that I must have run the software on Win95 not 98.

So now, I'm once again trying to gird my mental loins for battle. One would think that after having gone through all of this already with Win98, doing again only with Win95 should be no problem. Mmmmm. It was not long ago that I too believed such fairy tales.

 

[Frick]

Good luck with that.

 

[Kenshai]

I must have pissed off somebody with some real metaphysical juice, because I just can't win. Somewhere there is a stuffed rag sewn to look like a computer case and there are more needles in it than Keith Richards on a bender.

It turns out that my memory sucks even worse than I had . . . uh . . . remembered. There's an amusing turn of phrase in there someplace, but I don't have the patience to go on a treasure hunt to find it.

It seems that when I was using these tapes, I was also using Windows 95, not Win98SE. The reason I stopped using tapes was because writable DVD's became available and the cost per 4.7G DVD was less than half of what a 10G tape cost - or at least close anyway. The increased convenience and reliability would also have been considerations.

This wasn't a big deal for the straight backup software, but not all of the tapes used that. For a couple years, Seagate had a product they called "Direct Tape Access". It let you use the tape as a hard drive. You could even drag and drop stuff. If you didn't know any better and tried to use it like a disk drive, don't plan on going anywhere for a few years. But if you understood the limitations, it was nice being able to back up several gig and then just write a couple files when you needed to update rather than redoing the entire tape. I know you can do incremental and differential backups, but there's something to be said for having everything on one tape and being able to do updates on the fly.

After futzing with a 3 tape backup for a few days and getting almost all of it (last tape had some problems), I figured I would check out one of the DTA tapes. Again, being a pack rat came in handy as I was able to find both versions of the software on old CD backups. But neither worked. I finally realized - still not sure how - that I must have run the software on Win95 not 98.

So now, I'm once again trying to gird my mental loins for battle. One would think that after having gone through all of this already with Win98, doing again only with Win95 should be no problem. Mmmmm. It was not long ago that I too believed such fairy tales.

My room mate has a copy of Windows 95 with usb support if it might help I could ask him to loan it out to you

 

[twilyth]

Sweet Jesus!!! Was Win95 a piece of shit or what? It's like one of those crazy homeless people who are so fucked that when they shit themselves they actually smell BETTER. (BTW, while there are a lot of people who scam the soc. sec. and welfare systems, there are also a lot of people who really do need our help /sermon).

First, there were about 5 or 6 flavors of Win95. Personally, I think a shit sandwich will always taste like shit, but this is what I've read. There is no USB support until OSR/2 or something like that.

Second, the concept of 'usb support' in this context is like talking about the virginity of the girl in high school who went down on every jock who didn't have a restraining order against her. While it might be technically accurate, the impact isn't really what you might have hoped for.

The 'supporting files' are buried in a cold, dark subdirectory of the win95 install disk. Maybe I was just tired, but I would have sworn that it kept changing location and that I heard voices saying something like 'these are not the program files you are looking for'.

Third, it's not a real cluster fuck unless you're getting it from at least 2 different directions. So in addition to doing the Win95 shuck and jive, you've also got to install the appropriate mobo drivers. I searched for hours and couldn't find the CD for the Asus A7V I'm using. BUT, I had listings of every file in every directory of each of the 300-400 archive cd's I've accumulated over the years. It finally occurred to me to search the listings.

Now, I had already gone the Asus web site and dl'ed everything they had for this board. Nothing for USB under Win95. But when I found the archived contents of the CD, it was in there. I guess I can't get too pissed at Asus. I mean, (looks at calendar saying '2009'). (Looks at OS labeled '1995'). After 15 years, you gotta let some shit slide.

I have more to talk about, but right now I'm going to see if I can make this pig sing.

edit - Kenshai, thanks for the offer.

 

[twilyth]

I finally had to give up on W95, what a POS. I went back to W98SE and after a bit of struggling managed to get both the ethernet card and usb drive to work.

I installed the older version of the direct tape access software and the w9x version of backup exec. I've gone through almost all of the tr4 (4/8gig) tapes. That's about a dozen or so thus far. These sell for around $8 each, used, on ebay.

I've even managed to get the machine to recognize both the Conner TR4 drive and the Seagate TR5 drive at the same time. Woohoooo!!! Unfortunately, the software can't run more than one instance at a time, but at this point I'm not being fussy.

The only issue I've run into is the fact that the software can't seem to successfully complete a security erase on any of the Tr4 tapes unless I first initialize them. A little odd, but again, I'm not going to nit pick.

It looks like I might even be able to get a few bucks for each of the drives. Although maybe they would be better off in my little museum of obsolete technology.

One interesting ghetto fix related to the TR4 drive. The belt on the drive wheel kept coming off because it was too loose. I used some tacking glue to fix that. It's the sort of glue that if you put it on and let it dry, it stays tacky. So I put it on the inside of the belt and it has stayed put. Initially it was a little too tacky and would stop the wheel from spinning, but eventually that evened out and now it works perfectly.

I have something similar that is used for fan belts, but that's probably too heavy duty. Plus the belt is only about 1.5-2" in diameter an no more than 1-2mm thick.

Now let's hope I get good results with the TR5 drive too. I've had it working in previous configurations, so i don't anticipate any major problems.

BTW, I imagine no one really cares, but I figured I should follow up.

 

[twilyth]

Thread necromancing alert. If raising threads from the dead offends you, you should look away.

Wow. It doesn't seem like 2 years since I last got involved with this crap and I really don't know what possessed me to try again. I guess I got tired of looking at the tapes littering my shelves, not to mention the piles that got knocked over and ended up in various inaccessible places.

What happened last time was that I needed the space that the old Pentium rig was taking up and never got around to finishing the project. I think I did manage to erase all of the TR4 tapes but never finished with the TR5's.

My fix using some sticky stuff on the drive belt didn't end up working so I actually bought another drive of the same model but this time got one with an IDE interface. What is just too classic about that idea is that now, none of my machines has IDE headers any more. So I had to get an IDE/PCI adapter.

Once I realize that the adapter card needed drivers to work, I could get the drive to be recognized by the OS. I was even able to set it up as a SCSI device and have it recognized inside of the virtual machines I was trying it out on. However no matter how I tried to access the drive, once I told the tape software (multiple varieties) to write to the tape, even if it was just to do an erase, I kept getting errors.

At this point, my best guesses as to why it's not working is that something is getting lost in the translation between IDE to SCSI (card emulates a SCSI device) to PCI. Also, I need to flash the tape drive's bios and I can't do that since it exists at an address that is now where near where IDE addresses reside.

I still have the old Pentium rig and now have a place I can put it, but instead, I'm going to rebuild another machine with a long lost m/b and Phenom 940 chip. It should be pretty fast for running a VM and the m/b has an IDE header. I've staged all of the parts for assembly and now just have to locate an AMD HSF bracket.

 

[micropage7]

5 thumbs for you, the last i run 98se was on my 166mhz pentium 1 and thats long long ago
glad you put much effort on ancient os (its been more than 10 years)

 

[FordGT90Concept]

After finding out that the only browser that will run reliably, if at all, under Win98se is Opera, I managed to find a site that has generic USB drivers.

Probably not relevant for you but for future reference...

Windows 95: IE 5.5
Windows 98: IE 6
Windows XP: IE 8
Vista/7: IE 9

I would definitely recommend using a Pentium III/Athlon era platform for doing what you're trying to do. They'll have everything you need hardware wise in addition to an OS (Windows ME/98 preferable) that is fully supported. The problems could be arising from something as simple as a newer processor missing instructions required by the software which only an older processor would have.

If you know someone that hordes old computer hardware, you should ask them if they have something you could use. Alternatively, you could probably find an old computer that would fit your needs at a garage sale, county auction, etc.

 

[Steevo]

I'm really surprised I haven't started throwing shit yet. I have a butt load of old Travan tapes that I want to sell but I need to erase the data and maybe look at some of the tapes to make sure there's nothing there I care about. I'm using an old Adaptec SCSI card.

There were no drivers for Vista 64-bit so I set up another machine with Vista 32. That didn't work because I couldn't find software that would recognize the tape drive. Well, I did, but i couldn't get it to work.

I tried setting up a virtual machine, but there doesn't seem to be any way to patch the scsi driver through to the VM.

So finally I broke down and figured I'd just install Win 98 in it's own partition and run the original driver and software. Except every time I install the OS, I get an error message saying that there isn't enough memory to load windows. There's 533k of DOS memory free, but no high memory. The total memory is 4Gb. I tried safe mode, but it's the same thing.

So now, I'm rebuilding yet another machine based on a Pentium 4 chip and mobo. If this mutha fucking piece of shit cock sucker doesn't work, I'm going to have to kill something.

I can sell those tapes for about $10 a piece and I've got at least 30 of them - well, maybe less since half are Travan 4 (5gb?) and the rest are Travan 5 (10gb native). Maybe it's not like hitting the lottery, but it's something.

Anyway, anybody who was around for Win98 probably has Alzheimer's by now, but if anyone has a clue as to why it would give me that error, I'd be very interested.

Oh, something else that's odd. When I try to boot from the cd to a dos prompt, it leaves me with a prompt for the A: drive. Except I don't have a floppy drive in the box. I even have it disabled in the bios. One last thing I'll try is reformatting the drive and reinstalling in case there is some corruption from a previous install - but I'm not expecting anything.

The IT gods have got a hard-on for me. Everything I touch that's PC related seems to turn to shit. I'm almost afraid to touch anything.

I dont have alzimers, allheimers, old mans disease.


But himem.sys as well as other files on a FAT32 bit partition or FAT partition are required as the kernel mode drivers need that 512 to 2MB for knowing WTF to interface with to even allow more shiz to load.

http://www.mdgx.com/secrets.htm


This goes into some of the reasons 9X was dropped, memory support and drivers were the biggest. No direct control over drivers and interfaces as allowed by NT kernel.


I used to be able to jack 95 and 98 like they were nothing. Plus setuppp file during setup for no key was awesome.

 

[whitrzac]

1. take old HDD apart for the neo magnets...
2. wipe magnet across tapes a few times each
3. ???
4. profit

 

[Steevo]

I have one of those magnets stuck to the bottom of my office chair just in case.

 

[remixedcat]

he's a pack rat

 

[Steevo]

I still have about 5 complete older systems downstairs including a dual processor pentium pro HP Proliant with a travan on SCSI that I rewrote the boot sectors for as it has no BIOS. Last I had it running it was on Debian "woody" with some custom drivers. Slow as shit when you are used to a Ghz+ machine. It did run a full version of NT back office, and still ahd a insurance companies files on the travan and hard drives. Silly people upgraded without cleaning house.

Your issues are with the memory space remap that the drivers are requesting, the host OS will not allow it. What are you hosting it on? And why not allow the host OS to control the device?

 

[twilyth]

1. take old HDD apart for the neo magnets...
2. wipe magnet across tapes a few times each
3. ???
4. profit

Surprisingly, that doesn't work. I tried that with some VCR tapes once (don't ask why) and a de-gausing, bulk tape eraser. Of it was from radio shack and I have no way of measuring the peak gauss, but when I put it to my forehead it made feel a little stoned. OK, pretty much anything makes me fee a little stoned, but I'm pretty sure it was working as intended. It did screw the tapes up but they were still viewable. I guess for digital media it would make it unreadable, but I'd rather do a security erase. I'm sure there's nothing but crap on the tapes, but I'm too paranoid not to be thorough about it.