Windows 7 Ultimate Iso 64 Bits Drive
Autumn Pitz
I have a new machine installed with win 7 64 bits with UEFI but when I want to add an old hard drive (MBR) the system wont boot.Is there any solution to this problem without having to format the second disk or reinstall win7 with hotfixes applied?
I had problems booting Windows 8 with another hard drive. Then I found this post: Windows (using UEFI boot on GPT disk) will no longer boot after adding an MBR hard disk ; the solution worked for me. The main problem is that you may have an extended partition on your other hard drive, which does not seem to be a good idea when booting Windows with UEFI.
The trick with the disk signature also worked, but was only enabled me to boot windows once (the trick had to be done for every boot). I think it is still a good idea to try it before playing with the partition table. But you should be extremely cautious when using dd like this.
I have been looking at my Window 3.1 Hard disk image on PCem. And it has like 6095 Cylinders and 2999 megabytes. And I am questioning if using the 32 Bit disk access will work on my Windows 3.1 VM on PCem...
What is saying that "The 32BitDiskAccess driver that is supplied with Windows 3.1x, WDCTRL, is limited to hard drives with 1024 cylinders or less (504MB or less). If a larger hard drive is installed and 32BitDiskAccess is enabled, Windows may lock up or freeze when started or it may return an error message such as "Insufficient memory to start Windows..." or "WDCTRL validation failed at phase XX,XX"."
Would using a program driver like 32 Bit Disk Access will work on a 2 GB DOS/Windows 3.1 hard disk, have you tried using 32BitDiskAccess on a Windows 3.1 2GB hard disk and ran into some problems like mentioned on the source I found? And is 2GB large for a Windows 3.1 hard disk?
The reason why I often recommended that MicroHouse driver.. :
It does work. And it does with HDDs of different brands.
I'm using it for many years now on different systems (real 386 PC, 486 laptops, Virtual PC 2007, PCem).. It can handle disks up to 8GB maximum.
Note that I say "disks". I really mean that.
Disks with larger capacity can cause trouble.
Like an address-wraparound that may causes data corruption if the systems tries to addresses beyond 8GB (didn't Win95 have similar issues, but with secondary partitions ?).
This could happen even though you'd may try limiting the drive's capacity artificially by using custom values in CMOS Setup..
MS-DOS 4/5/6 has a similar 8GB limit, by the way, though it doesn't recognize LBA (not LBA aware, DOS 7+ starts being LBA aware) unlike the 3rd party FastDisk drivers. Thus it will happily accept any values the BIOS reports.
The supplied disk utilities (FDISK, FORMAT) may have their own limitations here, but's that not so important.
Drivers like the newer WDCTRL driver, distributed by Western Digital, do check for the manufacturer ID and refuse to work if you use a HDD by the the competition.
Similarly, a FastDisk driver made by Maxtor will only work with Maxtor HDDs.
The MicroHouse driver is thus a bit special.
If you're looking for an alternative, have a look for a Dynamic Drive Overlay software.
Some DDOs do include FastDisk drivers, too. And they are not "dongled" to a specific HDD series.
But there's more - The 386 Enhanced Mode of Windows 3.1x does also emulate Keyboard/Mouse ports (PS/2 ports).
It does so because of multitasking. Due to that emulation or virtualizations, multiple DOS programs can think they have full control of mouse/keyboard.
Only Windows itself communicates with the real ports.
Edit : So the bottom line is:
- 32Bit Disk Access is the Windows 3.1x HDD driver that runs in Protected-Mode.
- 32Bit File Access is the WfW 3.11 HDD cache. Like SmartDrive, though simpler (no CD, floppy caching). But it runs fully in Protected-Mode like FastDisk.
As for the Windows 3.1 386 enhanced mode Mouse emulation, how is my mouse not working when in a DOS VM and if Windows 3.1 handles DOS VMs better then why is one of my DOS get these system integrity errors? There is no other Vogon I know of that knows about this 32-bit disk access thing if it affects 386 enhanced mode.
i'm wondering if you use microhouse fastdisk software suite and driver to gain access to 32 bit disk access. i know its kinda pointless on a fast system like this, but i remember it completely remove stutters when windows falls back to using legacy 16 bit bios disk access even a fast athlon system i had.
Edit: Correction.. Back in the 90s, people talked about EIDE or E-IDE (Enhanced IDE), not just IDE or ATA/PATA, even.
So if you're looking for a BIOS or card, please also use EIDE or E-IDE as search terms..
I just booted an Athlon II X2 machine off a MSDOS disk the other day, and MSDOS 6.22 FDISK didn't see more than 8G per drive. i.e. it thought ll drives were 8GB, despite being much larger. Maybe Ranish or Ghost or something in the DOS versions can put partitions in higher, but looks like stock 6.22 can't.
I don't know how many drives does expect Micro House driver. With the older version I did get an error on 4 drives (as in the picture of my earlier post) but I have actually 7 physical drives connected. Maybe 3 of them got 32bit access? (didn't check)
2) NVME SSD which can be accessed under DOS and Windows 3.1 and later. FAT 16 partitions made on NVME are actually my main 16bit storage. It is bootable in DOS but it's not Windows friendly. (does not work with 3x/9x/NT)
I don't know how many drives does expect Micro House driver. With the older version I did get an error on 4 drives (as in the picture of my earlier post) but I have actually 7 physical drives connected. Maybe 3 of them got 32bit access? (didn't check)
2) NVME SSD which can be accessed under DOS and Windows 3.1 and later. FAT 16 partitions made on NVME are actually my main 16bit storage. It is bootable in DOS but it's not Windows friendly. (does not work with 3x/9x/NT)
.. um, do you mind if I may ask a question ? I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I'm curious.
What exactly is the priority of this project/experiment ?
I mean, is it more about finding a way getting 32BDA working or
more about finding out how much Windows 3.1 can handle before it collapses? ?
So in order to make the MicroHouse driver working,
it's important that there's an actual IDE/PATA controller visible to the PC.
Or more precisely, a basic IDE host adapter (ISA), at least.
A PCI style PATA controller with bus-mastering is supported, too, I think.
If your motherboard/UEFI doesn't have that ability,
you could try adding a PCI/PATA controller card.
There are PCI-PCIe adapter cards that may get them working in PCIe 1x slots.
Haven't really tried this so far.
The main project for me... is to have all Windows versions running on the same PC. I'm almost there. Only for NT 3.1 couldn't find a proper PCI disk controller but I'm still looking.
I have Windows 3.11, NT3.51 and Windows 95A all running fine with sound and video support on this Ryzen configuration.(Also 98SE, NT4.0, 2000 and all the rest)
32bit disk access in Windows 3.11 it's not a thing for me, but some youtube user was curios about this posibility... In real life, using a SSD via int 13h gives you about 10MB/s throughput... which is twice as much a regular hard drive could deliver in 1995. Not to mention the access time.
I installed a very simple 64-bit windows program using the 'Install a non-listed program' option. For the virtual drive, I selected the '64-bits Windows Installation' option. This works perfectly and I am able to successfully install the program. The program installer has an option to 'launch now' once the install is done, and if I select this option the program starts and runs perfectly.