Have you ever found something really badly designed? Something which obscurity of its functions makes it hard to understand its use? Something almost unusable to a point it would drive you mad using it too often? Perhaps, a fool's design? Then you have come to the right place. Post your findings here and help making the world a saner place.
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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2013-03-30 05:02 »

Clean install, no VM console. U98SESP3 with all updates installed. I believe you was on the right track with the last option.

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2013-03-30 11:21 »

Here we go,

Make sure you have MDAC and WMI installed on your Win98 system.
Copy ALL CAB files from the Win9x folder from the Windows ME CD.
Download the ZIP file and place all of the files in the same place where the Win ME CAB files are.
Copy the PCHEALTH.INF from the ZIP file to C:WindowsInf directory.
run this command

Code: Select all

C:windows
undll.exe setupx.dll,InstallHinfSection PCHealth.Install 132 C:WINDOWSINFPCHealth.inf

ReBOOT.

Create a Restore Point.
Reboot.
Make some small changes.
Restore Point you created.
Attachments
RESTORE.ZIP
(482.36 KiB) Downloaded 463 times

Blissy

2013-03-31 12:25 »

I followed your instructions, and additionally copied the vxdmon.vxd to systemvmm and when i rebooteded I got a SPFDLL.DLL linked to missing export WINTRUST.DLL:CryptCATAdminAcquireContext.

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2013-03-31 13:53 »

You have to start from the point before you installed system restore or it won't let you replace the files.

1. Download the latest SP for Windows 98 Second Edition http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/downloads.htm
2. Install Main Updates only and reboot.
3. Install all options except for Mdac 2.8 SP1 and reboot. This is only for testing purposes. All options are not required for System Restore, but some updated files are. I don't have a list ATM, so to avoid any future errors lets install everything.
4. Install Mdac 2.8 SP1 and reboot.
5. Follow the System Restore instructions I posted already.

Depending on how fast your system is, it should take approximately 20 min to install everything including reboots.

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2013-04-01 23:12 »

Do you know what this key means?

Code: Select all

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSystemFileProtection]
"SfpDbHash"=hex:12,02,22,78,30,b7,c5,44,98,d1,24,5e,c9,bb,98,c1,d3,d5,6d,ec
;

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Fool's design
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2013-04-03 00:46 »

Non Hic wrote:
Blissy wrote:...when you booted normally, it had no drivers for the mouse of keyboard loaded, so it was impossible to click the "next" button on the driver installation dialog. Very frustrating...

A fool's design, for sure! :lol:...

That is indeed foolishly designed! This topic belongs in the "Fool's design, editorials.", we should have moved it in here from the start. :!: :idea:

EDIT: Although, some topics become a little blurry, for example this one started as a story about a foolishly designed something and then moved into some Windows 98 help discussion within the replies. That's not a problem though, we will not tell people to "Keep on topic", that would be pure bullshit... but for categorizing a topic, we will use the original first post on each thread. Anyway, choosing the right category is not an exact science so we will have to giggle things into place in the start.

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2013-04-14 21:59 »

Blissy wrote:Specifically, we might try changing the jz at 76113F13 to jmp, since it is the last conditional branch before it sets that it is protected.
I tried this and it didn't work. System Restore didn't restore anything.
Blissy wrote:You know, I started to think about this and I seemed to remember that Windows ME (unlike 2k which had some files hardcoded) was fairly to easy to configure which files would be protected by sfp. So, I started to look into it a little and have configured sfpdb.sfp and filelist.xml files to only protect the dos command EDIT.COM. I would have removed everything, but when I did that it system restore fail to make restore points, so at least 1 file is needed. Instead of patching a .dll, which, by the way, could be overwritten by an update, this is probably an easier way to go about it, if you're willing to give it a try.
I gave it a try, and it worked. No problems upgrading or downgrading files or anything. It seems System File Protection and System Restore go hand in hand at some point.
Blissy wrote:You could patch the code to read data from a different .CAT file (and empty one) than it writes to when it does updates.
This is exactly what we might need. Can you give me a hand with this? If we combine this method with your other method using the modded FILELIST.XML we might just be able to get it working. I remember someone did something similar to this for Windows 2000/XP. I also learned that System Restore requires IE 5.5 or higher core files to work.

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