VOGONS


First post, by Great Hierophant

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Windows 98 has an effective hard drive size limit of approximately 137.4GB. In terms of a physical hard disk drive, a 120GB drive is the largest drive you can expect to work with the OS without the possibility of data corruption. While the FAT32 can support 2TB drives, Windows 98 is safe only with drives within the 28-bit LBA standard, which gives a maximum of 137.4GB. 48-bit LBA patches exist but require BIOS support for them to work reliably. Not everyone wants to sacrifice a PCI slot to a disk controller card.

137.4GB may seem like a huge amount of space, but when you start loading up your drives with full installs of games which originally came on several CDs, that size can start to shrink steadily. Moreover, most games require a CD in their drive to get past a copy-protection check. If you don't want to deal with a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, that requires storing a CD image of game somewhere where a CD emulator like Daemon Tools can access it.

For many years, my preferred method of access was to create shared folders and later a network drive with my modern PC, whether that PC ran Windows XP, 7, 8.1 or 10 and allow my Windows 98SE machine to access it via my home network. This solution worked well to access my vast archive of CD-ROM images via Daemon Tools and install games without having to copy images over to the older machine. Eventually Windows 98 lost the ability to write to a modern Windows network drive, but I really did not care so long as I could read from the network drive.

However, by the time of Windows 10's Fall Creator's Update, that functionality was completely lost. Windows 10 could send files to a folder shared on a Windows 98 machine, but Windows 98 could no longer access the Windows 10 machine at all. I believe I found the reason it fails to communicate, it is that Windows 10 disables SMBv1. SMBv1 is an out-of-date and insecure communications protocol. Ransomware like WannaCry and Petya use SMB as an attack vector to exploit vulnerabilities that end up encrypting your hard drive unless you pay for a decryption key. But Windows 98 doesn't "speak" any version of SMB higher than v1, v2 was introduced with Windows Vista. Hence you get error messages like "Unable to access volume on Windows NT domain" and the like.

Is there a better solution to communicating directly with an old version of Windows than opening up a modern computer to ransomware attacks? If nothing else I could use an older machine as a file server and connect it and the Windows 98SE machine through their own wired network.

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Reply 1 of 8, by leileilol

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An XP VM in VirtualPC or VirtualBox sharing a shared folder on the network?

I used to use a W98SE VM for painless network transfers to W9X machines from a modern one, but as for having one just serving files for them 24/7 I'm not sure about that use case.

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Reply 2 of 8, by Zup

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You could use a Raspberry Pi as a file server connected to an USB disk. Also, maybe you can get a cheap ethernet NAS that supports SMB.

Both options may be slow (cheap NAS aren't too fast, and the ethernet interface of a Raspberry Pi is slow), but they will need less power and produce less heat and noise than using an old computer as a file server.

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Reply 3 of 8, by DosFreak

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SMB1 can be re-enabled, check Programs and Features:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/w … n10itprogeneral

Also try this:
Windows 98 PC suddenly stopped appearing in the Network on my main (Windows 7) PC

Alot of NAS devices supports NFSv2 and NFSv4 as well so assuming your hosts has NFS support and you have an NFS client then that should work.

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Reply 5 of 8, by ATauenis

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You may use a FTP server such as Small HTTP Server (it can operate as a HTTP, FTP, POP3, or SMTP server). It is free (at least, for CIS citizens, a free key is easy to google, and it is working with both russian and english languages). A FTP client is included in almost all TCP/IP stacks. Windows 98 (and 95 with IE4+) can work with FTP even in Explorer.
As far I known there was a some way to mount a FTP folder as a virtual drive. WinXP can do it via My Computer window, older version probably requiring some third-party software.

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Reply 6 of 8, by DosFreak

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Some would say using Windows itself is a vulnerability and if you're using Windows 9x then that's another "hole" already. Use Windows Firewall to restrict access to SMB if you are worried about vulnerabilities and you don't want to use any other solution and/or enable and disable it using the registry or powershell.

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Reply 7 of 8, by chinny22

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I also thought mapping a drive letter to FTP would be good solution, and seems it is possible either with 3rd party software or inbuilt to IE5?
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.ph … -a-drive-letter

I gotta say though, your running out of space with 120GB x3!
You have a lot of games!!!!

Reply 8 of 8, by ATauenis

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ATauenis wrote:

As far I known there was a some way to mount a FTP folder as a virtual drive. WinXP can do it via My Computer window, older version probably requiring some third-party software.

chinny22 wrote:

and seems it is possible either with 3rd party software or inbuilt to IE5?

No, even with Office 2000's Web Folders installed it is not possible to mount FTPs in Win9x with IE 4/5/6. The FTP mount feature is added only in Windows 2000/ME+ shell. And the folders are mounted as shortcuts, not as drives (i.e. no DOS apps will be able to work with them and apps cannot be started directly from them). Need to use some third party software.

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