ARGGGGG. OK. I installed davidrg's vibra16 drivers. The installation seems to go fine, the card is recognized and working in DOS but STILL it doesn't appear to be loaded by WFW. This time for sure the SYSTEM.INI is configured and the drivers are listed in the control panel drivers applet. I just don't understand what's going wrong. The mixer runs, but when I try to play a midi it just says that no driver is loaded and I should visit the control panel 😒
Questions:
1. Should win /b show the loading of these drivers in the bootlog.txt? Because it doesn't.
2. If answer to 1 is "No" is there some other way to troubleshoot the loading of the drivers to make sure they are actually being loaded?
I wonder if you might have some bad RAM - might explain the stability issues with the network software too. Also possible the previously installed drivers have messed something up in windows.
I will try that but to me this seems clearly to be a driver/configuration issue since different installations have different things not functioning in very repeatable and similar ways. At this point I have one drive with a windows 3.1 install that has working packet drivers in dos, working sound in windows and dos, but hangs if I don't uninstall the packet driver before starting windows. I have the original drive with a legacy wfw install that has fully working windows networking but sound isn't working. Lastly I have a drive with a fresh wfw install where nothing works at all! Lol
Yeah, you're certainly having some unusual problems. What model computer are you using? I guess a hardware resource conflict is possible though it seems unlikely - I would have thought if it was that you'd see the crash when the NIC driver starts or when you try and use the network, not when you start Windows 3.1 which knows nothing about it. I've always just left NIC resource settings at whatever their defaults are and its worked fine regardless of PC.
The only other thing I can really think of is if you've still got the Windows 3.1 install where sound works fine it might be worth giving that 32bit Novell network stack a go if you haven't already. It works a bit differently from the other ones and it doesn't require any extra bits like trumpet or winpkt so it might not be affected by whatever is causing the problems the other ones are experiencing. If that doesn't work it might be easiest to find a different NIC - perhaps the SMC driver just doesn't like something about your PC causing it to mess up something in DOS which later upsets Windows.
Yeah, you're certainly having some unusual problems. What model computer are you using? I guess a hardware resource conflict is possible though it seems unlikely - I would have thought if it was that you'd see the crash when the NIC driver starts or when you try and use the network, not when you start Windows 3.1 which knows nothing about it. I've always just left NIC resource settings at whatever their defaults are and its worked fine regardless of PC.
The only other thing I can really think of is if you've still got the Windows 3.1 install where sound works fine it might be worth giving that 32bit Novell network stack a go if you haven't already. It works a bit differently from the other ones and it doesn't require any extra bits like trumpet or winpkt so it might not be affected by whatever is causing the problems the other ones are experiencing. If that doesn't work it might be easiest to find a different NIC - perhaps the SMC driver just doesn't like something about your PC causing it to mess up something in DOS which later upsets Windows.
Thank you David. It's been frustrating, but also a little fun 😉
The computer is a Gateway 2000 4DX-33. It's got an Intel (I think?) motherboard (marked 612194-004). Haven't found a manual for that yet. Right now I've got a DX2ODPR66 and 2x16MB FPM 72PIN non-parity RAM. I've also got the original processor and different kinds of RAM I can throw in.
For the record, the other weird behavior on this computer is that the motherboard IDE doesn't like SD/CF/DOM hard disks. Most of them won't even allow it to boot, which is how I ended up with the XT-IDE card. The computer came with the SMC card in and WFW already set up and configured from the previous user, but no sound card. I tried an MWave sound card I had, but that turned out to be not compatible with Win3.11, so I've been trying this SB CT4170 and had all the problems listed in this thread.
*sigh*
I'll give the Novell and some of the other suggestions in this thread a try next. I may also try again with a fresh WFW install using the vibra16 drivers you posted.
Never encountered one of those - was hoping it might be something I have like a Compaq Prolinea, PS/ValuePoint or DECpc, then I could go grab a PC plus one of these NICs and sound cards out of storage and see if I could reproduce the problem.
The CF card issues might have just been due to their size - I a lot of older BIOSes have issues with disks larger than various thresholds. Its good that you've got CF cards working now though - makes this whole thing a lot easier than having to install everything from floppy disks to spinning rust over and over!
By the way, if you did want to try to reproduce the sound issue, just try installing the vibra16 drivers you provided into wfw3.11. if that works for you and you get sound, then that would tell me the issue is with my hardware rather than what I'm trying to do, if that makes sense.
Ok, I've done some testing with this computer. Its currently using those Vibra16 drivers alongside the 32bit Novell network stack and WFW3.11. TCP/IP, IPX and Audio all work from both DOS and Windows.
I swapped out the 3Com card with one of these, an SMC EtherEz 8416BT:
Its not the same card as the one you're using so its not an ideal test (my other SMC cards are all in storage elsewhere) but it does use the same SMC8000 driver so perhaps good enough. The card has a Lanworks BootWare network boot ROM installed so while its not XT-IDE it is at least a ROM that will be using some amount of the real-mode address space.
First problem was the BootWare ROM complained on startup and wouldn't let me boot any further. This PC doesn't have a PnP BIOS and the card was configured for PNP so the card wasn't configured when the BootWare ROM tried to find it. So I had to pull the ROM out in order to boot to DOS, then I ran ezsetup -nopnp to disable PnP on the card. I then set the cards resources to I/O Base 260, IRQ 10, Window 8K, RAM Base 0c8000, Wait states, media type autodetect, ROM enabled, ROM Base 0CA000, PNP Boot disabled. The only changes from the defaults were the IRQ (defaulted to 5 which is used by the sound blaster) and the ROM (defaults to disabled). I could then put the ROM back in and the system booted fine provided I told the network boot ROM to boot from the hard disk rather than the server (it probably would have happily booted from DOS over the LAN if I let it too).
Next up was reconfiguring the 32bit Novell network stack. I edited startnet.bat to replace the 3Com driver with SMC8000.LAN (from this version of ether.exe, in the client32 directory), rebooted and the network came up fine. DHCP ran and I got an IP address, and the SNTPC client managed to connect to an NTP server on the internet and set the computers clock. I could Login to the NetWare server and get all my network drives. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 started fine, I got the startup sound out of the SoundBlaster, and I could run Internet Explorer 5 and connect to my FTP server fine. No sign of stability issues. So it looks like there are no obvious compatibility issues between the 32bit ODI driver (SMC8000.LAN) and the 32bit Novell stack, those Vibra16 drivers, DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11.
On this computer I don't have the Windows Network setup under WFW3.11 - the network setup window looks something like this:
This setting is only because I have the full NetWare client setup for talking to NetWare (or Mars NWE) servers. If I was only using the 32bit Novell stack for TCP/IP then "No windows support for Networks" would be the correct setting there. So to use that 32bit Novell stack for just TCP/IP you can ignore all of the network stuff in WFW3.11 - when windows setup asks you if you want to setup networking just tell it no.
In this PCs autoexec.bat for the soundblaster I have:
I ran the Norton Utilities 7 system info tool and attached a report of all the software and hardware interrupts in use on this machine. It doesn't seem to know much about the hardware interrupts but this is the config for all the cards installed in the machine AFAIK:
1PORT 2170 SoundBlaster IDE 3220 SoundBlaster 4240 UltraSound 5260 Network Card 62F8 Serial Port 7330 SoundBlaster MPU-401 8378 Parallel Port 93F8 Serial Port 10 11IRQ 125 SoundBlaster 137 UltraSound 1410 Network Card 1515 SoundBlaster IDE 16 17DMA 181 SoundBlaster Low DMA 195 SoundBlaster High DMA 207 UltraSound
Just the standard english version - the disks were all Microsoft branded. It was probably one of those generic OEM copies bundled with DOS 6.22 and that thick Windows+DOS manual. I imagine its pretty much identical to all the other copies floating around out there. I do have quite a lot of other stuff installed but nothing that I would fix any stability issues - if anything the stuff I have installed would probably create them!
Thank you so much!! Oh that sweet, sweet start up sound...
I don't know what was so broken about that original WFW3.11 install, but with all the stuff I've learned in this thread (esp. that last message of yours when you went through all your steps!) I was able to get it all working on a fresh install. I didn't get as far as trying the Novell stack since the MS one worked right away this time. Will try that in the future.
Here were the steps, in case anyone ever needs them:
1. Install WFW3.11, when it gets to network choose unlisted adapter and point to the ndis drivers from the ether.exe (zip) posted up thread.
2. Edit system.ini and add the following to the [386Enh] section (assuming your network card is at D400 and you're using EMM):
EMMEXCLUDE=D400-D7FF
3. Edit config.sys (same assumptions as above):
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=D400-D7FF
4. Install the vibra16 drivers posted earlier in this thread.
5. Go to network setup->drivers->add protocol and choose Unlisted, navigate to the MS TCP/IP folder and choose it.
6. Configure TCP/IP as appropriate
7. Sit back and enjoy!
Well done! Excluding the cards memory range from EMM386, etc, hadn't occurred to me - I'll have to remember that for later. In fact, I wonder if that's why I was having errors from emm386 when ever I tried running games using DOS4/GW a while back when I had a pile of shims loaded to let WFW311 do windows networking through the Novell stack. I might have to give that another go some time...
From here there probably isn't much point in looking at the Novell stack unless you want network drives under DOS - it doesn't come with any DOS or windows TCP/IP utilities (those were sold separately as a product called LAN WorkPlace) and few people ever bothered making their own DOS software compatible with it as until the early 2000s the SDK was sold separately too. So the only real time when the Novell TCP/IP stack makes sense is if its the only one that works for some reason, or you're already using the Novell network stack for network drives (something it does very well - it uses a lot less conventional memory than the Microsoft DOS client, and even a little less than EtherDFS).
