Win98/2m: Disabling Virtual Floppy Driver?

I have a Windows 98SE tower at my mother's house and want to install 2M on it in Windows mode. 2M is a utility for DOS that significantly increases the capacity of floppies. You can find it at 134 files found in diskutil. Its docs say that I have to disable the Windows floppy driver to get it to work and dives instructions on how to do it, but they are for Win95. How do I do it in Win98SE?

 

If you got this to download (my attempt was blocked by MalwareBytes) AND you trust the site/programmer, I'd try using the instructions for W95. Just be certain that you can undo things if it goes badly.

The limit on HD floppies was the reason why I originally went with an LS-120 drive.

 

Well...I have two Zip100 drives at my mother's house--anyway, I did--until I broke them both. My mother's getting replacements, and I'm waiting for them. I like floppies, though.

 

Never liked Zips: too prone to sudden, inexplicable, and always catastrophic failure. I understand that their bigger brother, the Jazz (?) was a little more hardy. I never had a problem with the LS-120s, either the diskettes or the drive itself.

 

Umm...you're right. How much would they cost?

 

Check Ebay. They're surprisingly scarce (the drives), and most looked like they were intended for laptops. The disks, though, looked to be reasonably priced. It's been awhile since I last looked.

The nifty thing was, that the standard internal drive connected to an IDE connector, so that it was faster in reading and writing, and your floppy was still available for whatever. There were also external drives in parallel or USB connectors. You really want the IDE version if you can find one.

 

I do have an IDE version of the Zip drive, and I need to install it. I also have a link to the instructions on installing it in a text file on my laptop. I just looked back at it and found that I need some supplies I might not have. The link is https://www.easeus.com/computer-ins...DPvVFxZmlzZbmNX2nR3aWJYr1OWgFuTnNH5eI37VXyzwY.

 

I am certain that, if you were to look around, you could find a local computer shop that has some of the old cables, jumpers, etc. still hanging around. What you really need, however, would be the instructions on how to set up an internal Zip which, while the set-up will be similar to a hard drive's, might have very important differences; the link you gave above was for hard drives, not Zips. Try this one:

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000416.htm

 

Thank you. I'll look now.

 

The last time I was at my mother's house, my mother said she didn't want me to operate on my Win98SE computer there, as I might break it. Worse yet, it is broken. First, I kept getting Exception oE errors, and reinstalling Windows helped a little. Then I was wondering why I was getting out of memory errors while trying to run DOS programs. The last time that happened, installing UMBPCI and loading high the RAM drive helped. I booted it in DOS mode and looked at the memory usage and found that DriveSpace was eating Conventional memory. I disabled the "dblspace=" setting in MSDOS.SYS. It didn't work. I forgot what happened next, but it forced me to reinstall Windows. Now, the computer crashes while Windows tries to install the hardware drivers. BTW, I'm not at my mother's house right now.

 

Harry, you was born into the wrong time brother. I remember having all kinds of strange issues like you have back in the day. Today it is very difficult to even remember what fix went with what problem, or if I ever even figured it out. I hope you get it all lined out my friend. Trial and error was my method back then. Have fun with it.