Index of /pub/freedos/win9x

 Name                    Last modified       Size  Description

 Parent Directory        02-Nov-2005 14:46      -  
 NOVOLTRK.TXT            26-Aug-2004 17:51     2k  
 NOVOLTRK.ZIP            26-Aug-2004 17:50    18k  
 NOVOLTRK.ZIP.old        03-Apr-2004 16:57    17k  
 README.TXT              03-Apr-2004 16:58     3k  

Hi Florian, hi Jim,

Please find attached an updated version of NOVOLTRK.ZIP (1.31 as of
2004-03-17), the \NoVolTrack\ registry patch for Windows 95/98/SE/ME
to keep it from corrupting (known) OEM labels in disk boot sectors
on any read or read-write access to a removable medium.

Background: In contrast to official documentation and popular belief
MS-DOS 3.1 (possibly earlier)- 6.22, MS-DOS 7.0 - 8.0 (Windows 95/98/SE/ME),
PC DOS 3.1 (possibly earlier)- 7.0/2000 & 7.1, and OS/2 depend on the disk
OEM label to be in a special format in order to correctly log-in certain
disks. (DR-DOS, FreeDOS, Linux, and Windows NT/2000/XP are not affected.)
The "Volume Tracker" in Windows 95/98/SE/ME will overwrite the disk OEM
label on the first access to the medium by some kind of "?????IHC" pattern
containing a CRC or session ID or such. This should help keeping track
of removable media, however, there are other solutions to this problem
and changing the OEM label may cause serious harm to the disk, if it
is not in a format still recognized by Windows afterwards (many disks
formatted with 3rd-party software are not).
Once the OEM labels got changed, the disk may no longer be recognized
by Windows after the next eject/insert cycle and cause faulty (!) error
messages to occur leading to the wrong (!) assumption that the medium
would somehow suddenly be damaged or weak.
Whilst these disks are still readable by operating systems not
evaluating the OEM label in any way (for example DR-DOS or FreeDOS),
depending on the actual format of the disk, a changed OEM label may
also make the disk unusable for its original purposes (for example,
as installation disk, as flash disk, or as backup disk, etc.).

Unless this patch gets applied to the registry, the only way to keep
"Volume Tracker" from acting this way is to leave the disk's write-
protection lever in the read-only position even on something as simple
and seemingly harmless as a "DIR a:"!

Disks having been corrupted by Windows 95/98/SE/ME already can be
"fixed" by patching the 8-byte OEM label entry in the boot sector
back to the original value with a disk editor. Unfortunately, it may
be impossible to find out the original OEM label in particular on
special purpose disks, which have hold serial numbers or other
special codes there. In so far, Windows' behaviour must be
considered very dangerous and it may cause serious loss of data.

For most Windows-corrupted DR-DOS formatted disks, an OEM label
"IBM  3.3" should help to "fix" the problem, but this does not
necessarily apply to other disks.

If someone knows more boot sector OEM labels in use somewhere,
please report.

Greetings,

 Matthias

--
<mailto:Matthias.Paul@post.rwth-aachen.de>; <mailto:mpaul@drdos.org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org