OK, this is the situation. Although having taken the big plunge away from Windows 98SE back in May, I still retained a small 98SE installation on a separate partition because I like to play a few old games which only run on the old DOS/9x platform. The way I worked it was to have a very small (500MB) partition for the 98 installation itself, with all the software I ran within it being stored on another partition.
At first, I was still using FAT32 on all partitions, so this setup worked fine. However a few weeks ago, I decided for various reasons to migrate all my partitions (except for the 98 one obviously) over to NTFS. This of course now means that I can't see the rest of my hard drive from inside Windows 98.
What I need therefore is an NTFS driver for Windows 98. I am aware that such products exist, but every one I've found only grants you read access for free, and you have to pay for read/write access. Not a small registration fee either, but quite hefty purchases. Although I'd like full NTFS access, I'm not prepared to pay that much money to have it. But the only alternative is to repartition my drive again, giving more space over to the 98 install - something I don't want to do.
So, does anyone there know of an NTFS filesystem driver providing full read/write access which is preferably free, or has only a small cost (i.e. not much more than £10 or so) attached to it?
Free NTFS driver for Windows 9x - does one exist?
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Neil Jones
- Posts: 661
- Joined: Thu 11 Sep, 2003 20.03
- Location: West Midlands
Would it not be easier just to buy a 2Gb drive off eBay or whatever and move your Win98 installation to that? They go for next to nothing.
Hmmm, is that not read only?SteveL wrote:Would something like this be adequate? It's free, and seems to do what you're after.
I remember having some sort of setup ages ago when trying to access stuff on my NTFS partition from Windows 98 (this was in the day when I had a real time trying to get my TV card to work under 2000).
With time I eventually dropped Windows 98 after I found some reasonable (albeit it-will-hang-at-random drivers) for my TV card and also the fact that "chkdsk" had went into disk-trashing mode and decided to chuck all the contents of the windows 98 directory into a found.001 folder and rename them fileXXX.chk extension where X is a number. I was not best pleased and couldn't be bothered to waste my time fishing out and renaming the files, so I left it at that.
Bloody thing, I'd like to see a Mac do this one day. :roll:
Can you not try and find some virtual machine software and set your games up in that?
It's basically two games, London Racer (Windows 9x only, won't run at all under anything else, no patch available) and Duke Nukem 3D (needs to run in real mode DOS). Aswell as that, I do have a bit of hardware (my TV card) which I frequently use for captures but I only have Windows 9x drivers for it. The TV card is the basic reason why I would like to be able to access my NTFS partitions with write access from inside 98. In time of course I'll complete the games and get a new TV card, but atm I still need to retain Windows 98 aswell.Do these games not work in the compatability mode of XP (I'm presuming you're XP and not 2000)?
It's an idea, but it would have to share an IDE channel with my main hard drive. Although it would work, an IDE channel can only run as fast as the slowest thing connected to it, and a drive as small as 2GB almost certainly doesn't support DMA, and forcing the whole channel to run in PIO mode would seriously degrade my system performance.Would it not be easier just to buy a 2Gb drive off eBay or whatever and move your Win98 installation to that? They go for next to nothing.
The registered version of it is exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, the free version is only read only.Would something like this be adequate? It's free, and seems to do what you're after.
Although things like Virtual PC and VMware are good, they both emulate a very basic and very old graphics card (an S3 Trio 64 IIRC) and they can't emuluate it fast enough to play full screen video games on.Can you not try and find some virtual machine software and set your games up in that?
It appears I want the moon on a stick then, the only things I can find that do what I need do so at a premium price.
It means either to want something which doesn't exist, or to want something to which you aren't entitled. Used in exactly the same context as the expression 'to have your cake and eat it' (a truly bizarre expression if ever there was one - why shouldn't you eat the cake - it is yours after all?).I meant, what does it mean? I've never heard of such a saying before.