johnyept wrote on 2021-10-10, 19:50:

I'm trying to setup LAN on my Windows 95B / NT4 SP6a machine so I can access files using FTP, but for some reason it doesn't work. No matter if I set manual IP or use DHCP, Windows 95 shows a message on startup about "Error 59 when loading protocol number 0", and Windows NT4 says "At least one service or driver failed during system startup". The message doesn't appear if I boot without the LAN cable connected, and the LAN card (RTL8139D) works fine with Windows XP, as also do the other two I tried, an Intel PRO/100+ and a SiS900. The router is assigning an IP to the machine because it's listed in the DHCP clients list, and I even tried to reserve an IP on the router by locking to the MAC address, but both Windows don't have an IP nor can ping anything.

Is there some kind of TCP/IP update I'm not aware of? For now I can use a flashdrive with Windows NT4 using Dell's very useful USB drivers for Windows NT4 (R62200.EXE), but I would much prefer using the practical 100MBps LAN over the plug/unplug USB 1.1...

Have you installed the WinSock 2 update for Windows 95? It's included in the Unofficial Service Pack 1.05, but if you didn't install that you need to download and install it separately.

Basically: Deinstall ALL network adapters, restart windows, reinstall network.

leonardo wrote on 2021-10-10, 20:38:

Have you installed the WinSock 2 update for Windows 95? It's included in the Unofficial Service Pack 1.05, but if you didn't install that you need to download and install it separately.

I'm not using unofficial Service Packs since they're only available in English or other languages, if I use them they usually mess up the system. Winsock 2 asks to install TCP/IP first which already is, or reboot and run Windows\WS2BAKUP\WS2BACKUP.BAT which doesn't exist.

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-10, 20:55:

Basically: Deinstall ALL network adapters, restart windows, reinstall network.

I have clean backups of Windows 95 and NT4 (Windows + Programs folders), so I can easily restore one Windows while running the other one, every network card I tested was installed on clean backups of Windows 95/NT4 without any network installed.

EDIT: I never had the chance to try it with my RETRO-W98 machine because the motherboard is not working, so I'll put another HDD on the RETRO-W95 and install Windows 98SE + Windows 2000 SP4 to see if it also happens with those two. I also forgot to mention that the computer connects to a cheap 8port 100Mbps LAN switch, and the switch connects to a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND Gigabit router. The switch works fine with Windows XP/7/8.x/10 and some consoles I tested over the years. I'll also try connecting a longer cable directly to the router to see if it makes any difference.

johnyept wrote on 2021-10-10, 23:03:

leonardo wrote on 2021-10-10, 20:38:

Have you installed the WinSock 2 update for Windows 95? It's included in the Unofficial Service Pack 1.05, but if you didn't install that you need to download and install it separately.

I'm not using unofficial Service Packs since they're only available in English or other languages, if I use them they usually mess up the system. Winsock 2 asks to install TCP/IP first which already is, or reboot and run Windows\WS2BAKUP\WS2BACKUP.BAT which doesn't exist.

Windows can be very fickle about the order in which you do these things. You have to install the network drivers and the TCP/IP stack first, then install WinSock 2.
It could also have to do with the drivers themselves.

Win95B or NT4 SP6 don't need any updates for TCP to pick up an IP address, so I'm also thinking its the card/drivers.
If typing ipconfig in either OS gives no IP address then it hasn't picked one up. I'm betting the entry you see in your router is from your XP install.

In your XP install double check which resources (IRQ and I/O) your card is using. XP is pretty good at guessing these correct. 95/NT is good at getting them wrong 😜

chinny22 wrote on 2021-10-12, 11:05:

Win95B or NT4 SP6 don't need any updates for TCP to pick up an IP address, so I'm also thinking its the card/drivers.
If typing ipconfig in either OS gives no IP address then it hasn't picked one up. I'm betting the entry you see in your router is from your XP install.

In your XP install double check which resources (IRQ and I/O) your card is using. XP is pretty good at guessing these correct. 95/NT is good at getting them wrong 😜

I just tested with 98SE + 2000 in dual boot and both work fine with the RTL8139D, Windows 2000 added the card during installation, and 98SE needed drivers for which I used the ones from the same RAR that contains the ones for 95/NT4. Both OS connected correctly to the network and successfully shared a folder with Windows 10... The card is working fine and so are the drivers, so the problem is down to Windows 95/NT4/Router configurations. The router is giving 192.168.0.100 to both 95/NT4 in all LAN cards I tested, the first IP in the pool since all other connected devices have a higher IP set by MAC address. I'll try to see what resources are being used in 98SE and compare to the ones in 95. I'm even tempted to remove all PCI cards and add a bunch of different LAN cards (3Com/Intel/DFE/RTL) to see which one performs better, since the current one showed speeds of 2.3MB/s in 98SE and 5.5MB/s in 2000, but I believe it was working at 10 to 11MB/s in XP, probably varies from RTL card to RTL card, I just picked one at random from the bin...

What type of CPU do you have in your machine and how much memory?

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-13, 10:23:

What type of CPU do you have in your machine and how much memory?

Its the Retro-W95/NT4 in my signature: ASUS P3B-F, PIII 550, 192MB (3x64MB), VooDoo3 2000 AGP, VooDoo2 8MB PCI, TV Card PCI, LAN card PCI, SCSI Card PCI + SCSI CD-RW HP, ESS1868F ISA, 120GB IDE, DVD IDE. Now that I look at it, it does have a lot of PCI cards, which might be creating havoc with resources. Maybe chinni22 is right and there might be a problem with IRQs, so I'll try removing all ISA/PCI cards except for the LAN card and see if that is part of the problem.

Yes, try it without VooDoo 2, TV Card, SCSI CD-RW and ESS1868F.

However, before you do this, run SpeedSys 4.78 and post a screenshot with it's IRQ list (press I after HDD test)

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-13, 13:03:

Yes, try it without VooDoo 2, TV Card, SCSI CD-RW and ESS1868F.

However, before you do this, run SpeedSys 4.78 and post a screenshot with it's IRQ list (press I after HDD test)

SpeedSys 4.78 on Windows 98 SE:

SpeedSys 4.78 on Windows 95 OSR2:

This specific Asus P3B-F has 1AGP, 6 PCI and 1 ISA (some have more/less PCI/ISA slots). According to the BIOS and the manual, AGP/PCI1, PCI3/PCI6 and PCI4/PCI5 share IRQs. My configuration is:
AGP - Voodoo3
PCI1 - not used for GPU airflow
PCI2 - Voodoo2, so the passthrough VGA cable is as close as possible to Voodoo3 VGA output
PCI3 - LAN card, since it's small it allows the Voodoo2 to "breathe"
PCI4 - SCSI card
PCI5 - TV card (for nostalgia, doesn't support Digital Terrestrial signal so I'll probably remove it)
PCI6 - not used because ISA slot overlaps the slot
ISA - Sound card

By changing PCI3/6 from auto to IRQ 5 in the BIOS, LAN now works in Windows 95, I got no message on startup and was able to share a folder with Windows 10. I did noticed in device manager the the LAN card was previously sharing IRQ11 with the IDE controller. In Windows NT4 however it still refuses to work, even if manually changing the LAN card IRQ to 5 in the properties. At least now I know it's a software problem and not a hardware problem. I'll try some other LAN cards since I read somewhere that some drivers/cards might or not support IRQ sharing. This just proves chinny22 was right and Windows 95/NT4 aren't good at configuring resources... Later today I'll try the LAN card on PCI1 and PCI5 to see if 95/NT4 somehow find their way to the correct IRQ values without me having to set them up manually.

johnyept wrote on 2021-10-14, 11:13:

... This specific Asus P3B-F has 1AGP, 6 PCI and 1 ISA (some have more/less PCI/ISA slots). According to the BIOS and the manual […]
Show full quote

...
This specific Asus P3B-F has 1AGP, 6 PCI and 1 ISA (some have more/less PCI/ISA slots). According to the BIOS and the manual, AGP/PCI1, PCI3/PCI6 and PCI4/PCI5 share IRQs. My configuration is:
AGP - Voodoo3
PCI1 - not used for GPU airflow
PCI2 - Voodoo2, so the passthrough VGA cable is as close as possible to Voodoo3 VGA output
PCI3 - LAN card, since it's small it allows the Voodoo2 to "breathe"
PCI4 - SCSI card
PCI5 - TV card (for nostalgia, doesn't support Digital Terrestrial signal so I'll probably remove it)
PCI6 - not used because ISA slot overlaps the slot
ISA - Sound card

By changing PCI3/6 from auto to IRQ 5 in the BIOS, LAN now works in Windows 95, I got no message on startup and was able to share a folder with Windows 10. I did noticed in device manager the the LAN card was previously sharing IRQ11 with the IDE controller. In Windows NT4 however it still refuses to work, even if manually changing the LAN card IRQ to 5 in the properties. At least now I know it's a software problem and not a hardware problem. I'll try some other LAN cards since I read somewhere that some drivers/cards might or not support IRQ sharing. This just proves chinny22 was right and Windows 95/NT4 aren't good at configuring resources... Later today I'll try the LAN card on PCI1 and PCI5 to see if 95/NT4 somehow find their way to the correct IRQ values without me having to set them up manually.

Please note that on these older boards, before the dawn of APIC, your system is restricted as per the number of available interrupts. Due to this it's important to determine which slots share resources as well as the BIOS settings for those slots.

This is from page 29 of your motherboard's manual:

You'll note from the above that on your board the AGP slot and first PCI slot share an IRQ, slot 2 does not share IRQs with any other devices, slot 3 & 6 share resources, and slots 4, 5 and the USB controller all share resources together.

I would recommend removing the Voodoo2 from slot 2 (why? you already have a V3!) and place a more finicky device in that slot.

Besides this, you'll want to see if your motherboard BIOS has the setting PnP OS Installed set to Yes/No.
On my older computer, I found to my surprise that Windows 95 actually performed much better with dealing out resources when this was set to Yes.

Beside leonardo's good post there may be a difference in the configuration of your ESS1868 TerraTec Gold 16/96 between Win95 and Win98.
Which devices are enabled on your sound card and which ressources do they use?

You may remove the VooDoo2 and the Bt878 based video card.

Then look for the IRQs 5, 7 and 10. How are they configured?

leonardo wrote on 2021-10-14, 12:58:

Please note that on these older boards, before the dawn of APIC, your system is restricted as per the number of available interr […]
Show full quote

Please note that on these older boards, before the dawn of APIC, your system is restricted as per the number of available interrupts. Due to this it's important to determine which slots share resources as well as the BIOS settings for those slots.

This is from page 29 of your motherboard's manual:
ASUS_P3B-F_IRQ-table.png

You'll note from the above that on your board the AGP slot and first PCI slot share an IRQ, slot 2 does not share IRQs with any other devices, slot 3 & 6 share resources, and slots 4, 5 and the USB controller all share resources together.

I would recommend removing the Voodoo2 from slot 2 (why? you already have a V3!) and place a more finicky device in that slot.

Besides this, you'll want to see if your motherboard BIOS has the setting PnP OS Installed set to Yes/No.
On my older computer, I found to my surprise that Windows 95 actually performed much better with dealing out resources when this was set to Yes.

Yes, the PnP option in the BIOS has been always set to Yes.
The network card was in PCI3 which shares IRQ with the unused PCI6, yet Windows 95 found it OK to use the same IRQ for those PCI slots AND the IDE controller. I moved the card to PCI1 and now both the AGP and PCI are using IRQ5 without conflicts. I also tested an Intel Pro/100+ card and got 2.2MB/s by copying files to a shared folder, and 4MB/s by using Filezilla FTP Server 0.9.9 (0.9.14 is supposedly the last Win95 version got i get KERNEL32.DLL errors with 0.9.10 to 0.9.14).
On Windows NT4, the Intel Pro/100+ drivers add Intel PROSet II to the system tray, which helped me find out that NT4 is not allocating an interrupt for the card, possible solutions suggested by the software are freeing an IRQ using the BIOS configuration (which I would prefer leaving in Auto) or reinstall the drivers if a restart doesn't solve the problem, which it doesn't.

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-14, 15:19:

Beside leonardo's good post there may be a difference in the configuration of your ESS1868 TerraTec Gold 16/96 between Win95 and […]
Show full quote

Beside leonardo's good post there may be a difference in the configuration of your ESS1868 TerraTec Gold 16/96 between Win95 and Win98.
Which devices are enabled on your sound card and which ressources do they use?

You may remove the VooDoo2 and the Bt878 based video card.

Then look for the IRQs 5, 7 and 10. How are they configured?

I didn't install any drivers, just Windows itself, then the network card. All the other PCI/ISA cards are still unknown devices in device manager. The TV card is already gone since there's no point in having it. The VooDoo2 was added because initially it was TNT2+VooDoo2, and now that it's VooDoo3+VooDoo2 I kept it because I don't intent to build another retro PC for it and I don't know if I might bump into a game that works with VooDoo2 but not VooDoo3

OK, Windows 95 network errors were unexpected since it's a PnP OS and SHOULD configure itself, but where in the world was I hoping that NT4 was able to manage IRQs, if the darn OS IS NOT PNP?

Disabling PnP in the BIOS and manually assigning IRQ5 to PCI1 finally gave me an IP in Windows NT4, and the service not starting was the Server service because after any network drivers installation, SP6a MUST be reinstalled (plus FAT32 .sys files in my case), since it includes many network fixes and network drivers usually "break" them.

The Server service now works which allows the Sharing tab to appear in any folder properties. Unfortunately Windows 10 is not able to access the folder, it asks for a login/pass, I already tried the default NT4 account (Administrator), plus another account with password and another account with the same login/pass as the account in Windows 10, but none of the three allowed me to access the shared folder.

Filezilla Server 0.8.8 worked OK on NT4 at 3.1MB/s, so now I have at least 1 convenient way to connect to both Windows, and it's at least 3x faster than USB 1.1.

Later I'll manually configure the IRQs for all PCI/ISA slots (maybe using Windows 98 IRQ usage as base), then install all drivers and try to fix any new conflicts that may surface.

In Windows 10 you have to enable SMB1 client.
On both machines time & timezone must be set proper.

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-15, 23:54:

In Windows 10 you have to enable SMB1 client.
On both machines time & timezone must be set proper.

Yes, it was already enabled, although I don't remember enabling it. But I finally found the last piece of the puzzle: "Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level" policy must be set, or more specifically, LmCompatibilityLevel (DWORD) at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa" must be set on BOTH Windows NT4 and Windows 10. I tested with values 1, 3 and 5, all worked OK and didn't affect Windows 95 shared folder, so I'm leaving it at 5 since it's the recommended level.

EDIT: just restored NT4 to a clean state to test another NIC, and I forgot to mention that the Guest account must be activated so the shared folder can be accessed without the need of login/pass.

johnyept wrote on 2021-10-16, 22:05:

EDIT: just restored NT4 to a clean state to test another NIC, and I forgot to mention that the Guest account must be activated so the shared folder can be accessed without the need of login/pass.

If both PC's are in the same workgroup you can get around this by using the same login details on both PC's as well

chinny22 wrote on 2021-10-19, 11:01:

johnyept wrote on 2021-10-16, 22:05:

EDIT: just restored NT4 to a clean state to test another NIC, and I forgot to mention that the Guest account must be activated so the shared folder can be accessed without the need of login/pass.

If both PC's are in the same workgroup you can get around this by using the same login details on both PC's as well

Thanks for the info. I always use the same workgroup (WORKGROUP) in all PCs, and I'm actually already doing that between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, I didn't know I could also do that with Windows NT 4.0 😉

One more tip for LAN speed in Windows 95/NT4: don't forget to enable DMA for the HDD! But make sure you backup Windows in case changing this setting breaks your already fragile Windows...
In Windows 95, go to Control Panel, System, Device Manager, open the properties of your HDD, check the DMA box and reboot. It now copies files to/from shared folders at about 4MB/s in my retro PC. Not a big improvement, but better than nothing.
In Windows NT4, try to find a SP4 ISO (not sure if SP5 or SP6 have it too), then run \SUPPORT\UTILS\i386\DMACHECK.EXE and enable DMA on both IDE channels. I can now copy files to/from shared folders at 9MB/s!