China DOS Union

I've been using Win2K for over a year now
and I've reinstalled Win2K who knows how many times,
but these last two reinstalls really put me through hell.

It starts with my use of dynamic disks (whether the cause of the problem is really the dynamic disk isn't completely clear yet, but it's probably very close).
Disk Management in Win2K introduced the concept of dynamic disks.
On dynamic disks, we can create spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes, these kinds of "partition modes".

But when I reinstalled Win2K Adv on a machine using dynamic disks and a striped volume, a problem came up.
(All the disks on that machine were using the NTFS file system.)

I booted the installation using a bootable Win2K CD.
Everything was normal at first.
After copying the files, it rebooted.
The machine finished POST, then stopped right where osloader should have started, with no response at all.

I panicked. The stuff on that machine had taken a huge amount of time to get to its current state.
And once you panic, it's easy for things to go wrong.
I tried reinstalling 2K again, useless.
So what was I supposed to do?
In desperation I used Win98's fdisk to delete the original C: drive, then created a new FAT32 partition there.
But when I looked, I was dumbfounded. The original C: drive was 3 GB, but the new FAT32 partition was 17 GB!!!
I knew right away something had definitely gone wrong...
In the end, the hard disk partition table was damaged, and all the data was lost!
My god!!!

Tonight, I reinstalled Win2K again on another machine using dynamic disks, but this time it was a spanned volume.
Having gone through that painful experience last time, I was much more careful this time.
Before reinstalling, I backed up the hard disk master boot sector, the C: boot sector, and all the related sectors.
Then I started the installation.
The result was exactly the same as last time: after POST, it just stopped.

I wrote back the backed-up MBR, still no good.
Then I wrote back the backed-up C: boot record. Yeah, Win2K came up

By comparing the C: boot record before and after the reinstall, I found that eight bytes were different.
And those eight bytes may very well be the dynamic disk marker? Or code for reading dynamic disks?

At least now I finally know what's going on. I'll definitely remember this when installing in the future.
Otherwise, if it causes losses, you'll really be crying to heaven and heaven won't answer, crying to earth and earth won't respond!

First my hands got itchy seeing that everyone else had installed Win2000 while I was still stuck with my crappy old 98,
so I started thinking about upgrading.
My machine specs were:
p166 no MMX
Qilin 590 motherboard, onboard 8330 sound card, SIS6326 graphics card (8 MB video memory, not shared)
Diamond 3.2G hard disk, SONY 8X CD-ROM, memory was KingMax PC100 64M + Hyundai original 128M
Remaining hard disk space: 500M each on C and D
I bought a Win2000 disc, and from that point the nightmare began.

First I edited the registry, changed the 98 version number to the first edition, and got through smoothly.
It recognized the disk, I chose a fresh install and dual boot.
Then it said there wasn't enough space. At that point, for some reason, I could no longer get into 98, so under DOS I used XCOPY
to copy Foxmail, OICQ, and the contents of My Document to drive D, which completed smoothly.
Then still under DOS, I deleted everything in C:'s Program Files, all of it, (using Deltree). While that was going on I went out
to buy some popsicles, and by the time I got home it was done.
Then I continued the installation, but during file copying there were two errors saying it couldn't find
two files on the CD. I pressed Esc to ignore them and got into 2000, and the installation finished. I timed it:
from power-on to Win2000 being ready,
it took a total of 58 seconds. For a crappy 166, I was pretty satisfied.
Then I installed the modem, an old built-in ISA 336 Hayes. I used another machine to go online and look for Hayes
Win2000 drivers, but there weren't any at all. Looks like Hayes had gone under. So I downloaded one from the closest model,
though I didn't even know what operating system it was for.
Back at my own machine, I installed the drivers for the sound card and graphics card. The sound driver was an NT4 one, and the joystick driver was wrong.
The system said it couldn't load that driver. I thought forget it, I don't use a joystick anyway, so I
disabled that device in Device Manager. Then I started looking for non-Plug-and-Play devices, because the ISA modem's port was virtual and didn't support PNP. After
a lot of searching, I finally found COM3. After installation I rebooted, only to find two exclamation marks on COM3 and COM1.
The mouse was connected to COM2, so it wasn't affected. I checked and found it was a resource conflict:
the two ports were sharing IRQ4. I thought, easy enough,
I'll just adjust it manually, but then I found that 2000 wouldn't allow manual adjustment of resource settings.
The new COM3 was either IRQ4 or IRQ3,
and IRQ3 belonged to COM2. If that got taken, then the mouse was gone.
I was really anxious. So I shut down, swapped the COM1 and COM2 cables on the motherboard,
but the problem remained. Then I changed jumpers on the modem. This time, great, even the mouse was gone.
Changing the modem to another slot didn't help either. Then suddenly I remembered to check BIOS. I kept changing
the IRQ assignments in BIOS, but it still didn't work.
Using the keyboard, I deleted all the COM ports and reinstalled them. The mouse did come back,
but COM3 still wouldn't work.
Then I checked the machine's resource configuration and found the sound card was occupying 3 IRQ channels, so I went into BIOS and disabled
the onboard sound card,
but the problem still remained. By this time it was already 9 PM. Then suddenly inspiration struck me. Since I only used one COM port anyway, I went into BIOS
and set the COM port not connected to the mouse to Disable. This time when I entered 2000, I saw two ports, COM1 and COM2, so I added
the modem. None of the drivers worked, and in the end I changed it to a standard 336 internal modem, and dialing worked smoothly.
I finally let out a long sigh of relief, moved the stuff from drive D back, directly deleted Win98 from drive C, hid the boot menu,
and set it to boot straight into 2000. Just as I was about to get online, disaster again: I found the browser wouldn't open, sterm couldn't get out, and it reported a Sock error, but
pinging outside websites had no problem at all. After messing around for half the day, it still didn't work. I figured maybe it was a Win2000 problem, so I checked the files that had been skipped during installation, and]
I broke out in a cold sweat. It turned out they were the underlying files associated with Internet connectivity. This time it looked like I had to change
discs. That very night I went out, knocked awake a guy selling CDs, and bought another Win2000 SP-1 disc. When I got home and tried to install it, of all times,
the CD-ROM drive stopped working too. I took it apart, adjusted the laser power, and tried again. It actually could read the disc. I didn't dare let the CD-ROM keep reading the disc continuously,
so I simply copied the entire SP-1 disc to drive D. As soon as I started installation, it suddenly said there still wasn't enough space on C. I thought since I'd already backed up my
data, I'd just format it -- and I even added /q/u after format. The moment it finished formatting I regretted it. When I had copied the CD earlier,
it seemed like there wasn't enough space on D, and I'd deleted something, right? I checked drive D. Too late.
I'd deleted my backup data. At that moment
I really wanted to cry. I quickly took out Norton's disk tools, first unformatted it, then tried Unerase. What I recovered was only a portion,
and all of it was Win2000 system files.
My photos, data, work成果, all gone. Wuwuwu~~~
I wasn't in the mood for anything. I lay in bed, sighing over and over, unable to sleep all night.
The next morning, early, I continued installing SP-1. Halfway through it was still missing a file, though a different one this time. After ignoring it,
the system couldn't boot normally, and Windows reported a hardware protection error. That was it. I felt like all hope was gone.
I thought of that picture of Stefanie Sun on my 98 desktop and nearly cried,
and also all those love letters I'd written to my wife,
and the scanned photos, and all the little dirty pictures I'd downloaded over half a year from the Internet, all gone.
In a daze I went to another pirate disc shop. Still unwilling to give up, I bought another Win2000 disc. When I saw it came with a serial number,
I thought there was hope (the first two hadn't needed serial numbers). Looking at the disc again, it seemed to be burned by someone personally. Just as I was about to buy it, I noticed
there was also a WindowsXP Beta2 next to it. Since the hard disk had already been formatted anyway, I figured I'd try XP first, so I made a deal with the shop owner:
if it didn't work I'd come back and exchange it for Win2000. Then I installed XP. It took a full hour and a half to finish, slow as that ox Kangfu, and then I looked again:
oh, so it was the Server edition. Forget it, forget it, I'll switch. So I formatted the hard disk yet again (XP's interface really is nice-looking).
I exchanged it for the burned Win2000 disc and installed it. This time it went fairly smoothly, with no missing-file errors, except that the serial number in the readme on the disc
was wrong. The readme also said that if it didn't match the one on the packaging, the one on the disc should be treated as correct. I waited until the file copying finished, but no matter how I tried,
it still wouldn't work. Then I tried the one on the disc packaging, and it passed immediately. I quickly took a marker
and copied the serial number onto the front of the disc.
This time I had experience. I went into BIOS, disabled COM1, used the standard 336 driver, and God bless, I actually saw
the Microsoft homepage again. Wuwuwu~~~ so dear and familiar. Then I looked at the modem driver and saw that multilink frames and compression weren't enabled. How could that do?
So I randomly searched around again for Hayes drivers, and actually found a similar model's one for win9x and used it.
A full boot (from power-on until the hard disk stopped moving after entering the desktop) took 1 minute 02 seconds, about right. Then after installing Office2000,
good heavens, startup was actually 15 seconds slower.
So that's how it is. I hurried and installed software and stuff. Sigh, and that's how it is now.

What it cost me was every bit of useful data and materials on my hard disk, all gone. In exchange I got one Win2000.

So miserable!!

Super strong

You guys still had it better than me. My hard disk has suffered four catastrophic disasters before, and every single one left me in agony.
What's even more infuriating is that every single time, I caused it myself. Not once was it because of a virus.
If Heaven creates the sin, you may still survive; if you bring the sin on yourself, you cannot live.