"IOssist, no, I do"

Well I've run up against yet another wall in my supposed project. I haven't the slightest idea how to fix it or if I will fix it. You see it was working perfectly was booting off the floppy and with the HDD in. Then all I did was burn the directory from the HDD to the CD and make a new image of the floppy I was using. Then make a bootable ISO of the two things as a combination and put it on CD. Perfect sense right? Then why isn't it working?

Well what I really did was try to get the whole thing working more effectively, with all the drivers etc. I used the device manager to get the names of all the files that made up the drivers for my video and network cards then mad the corresponding directories to be copied to the RAM disk upon boot. But I did something wrong because I get a error about IOSUBSYS being corrupt or the system is out of memory. Ok fine so I go to the CD and try go look at that directory on CD, IOSUBSYS. I do a cd subsys and...invalid directory. Invalid directory?! It's right there!

< DIR > IOSUBSYS

So why isn't it viewing the damned directory? I mean I changed the name, I moved the directory, I tried zipping and deleting all the files in the directory...and I still get the same error message. Why does it dislike this one directory but read on the other ones fine? What is it about that one directory?! Ok so I copied the iosubsys files to one of the stupid directory I could actually switch to and see the contents of then wrote a special batch file to copy just those files to an iosubsys directory on the RAM disk. Ahah, I thought, I'd fooled the system...it'll work now! But no. Same error. So the hell with it! I don't need no stinking drivers.

I did actually change to editing the config on the floppy and use the files on the CD. This is much easier than changing one item, re-making the floppy image, testing, re-making floppy image, burning, testing, repeat a hundred times...so I just use the CD and the write-protected floppy disk. Much better re-doing the bootable-floppy-on-CD over and over.

So now I've taken off everything but everybody favorite five system files, plus wininit.exe (I had a critical system shutdown once, putting that file on the RAM disk fixed it).

Ok now I'm getting IOSUBSYS errors with only the minimum system files available. I think I've about enough DOS to last me the next ten years. Maybe I'll, I don't know, take a break or something. Maybe I'll try making that bootable XP mixture or find some other distraction.

Speaking of distractions, I finally got in touch with an old friend from my time at "the company". He wants to start up a home computer repair business. Personally I have a few reservations about the whole thing. Like perhaps my friend is being a bit too glib about this this whole thing. It's not like businesses are terribly easy to set up and maintain or something. But in case something some how comes out of this I should mention yesterday (the 23rd) was my first meeting about said business. Today we bought our first supplies we figure we would need. Namely a crossover Cat5 cable and a "null modem" cable to be used through the serial port. And also one of those USB thumb drives.

My friend, Steve's his name, let me take home his old laptop to experiment with the null modem cable and see if we could get it working. So I need to work on that anyway really. But damn that sucks. I hate working on something for a week and a half and not succeeding! Maybe if stupid mkisofs actually worked the way it was supposed it might actually work.

So now I'm trying to get the laptop to hook up to my server though the null-modem cable. Doesn't seem to be working though for some reason. No, of course not. Why would anything actually work the way it was supposed to? Ridiculous.

Well it's now been at least 90 minutes since I started working on the null-modem project. And I can no report I have actually connected my server to the laptop, the laptop as the host. I think the secret was turning off any and all security (the laptop has Windows 98, and Windows 98 has no security, unlike Windows 2000).

The two are in fact connected. I can't actually see either computer from the other via the network, but they're connected. So figure that one out. On second thought...don't. Now if only I could Windows 98 to boot from a CD...hah!

Well it's approaching 1:30am now, so I think I'll stop. I would like to to mention that I've noticed my number of hits steadily increasing. An increase corresponding with my frequest updates and also that service that syndicates and notifies visitors of updates. I don't know who you all are or what you find interesting about this site, but I sure hope my unsuccessful attempts at a bootable Windows 98 entertained you. And in case I haven't said it enough...send me an email : ).

  ¶ 1:32 AM