Category: Windows

Windows 11

“We couldn’t update system reserved partition” error when Installing/Upgrading Windows 11 Insider Preview

Caution: This may cause your system to hang on boot.

I must admit, I haven’t done a fresh install of this system since upgrading to Windows 10 1903, moving the NVMe drive from an older laptop to this machine, updating the OS about every week to the latest version of the Insider Preview in the DEV Channel. This is bound to cause issues at one point, I’m aware.

Windows Update threw me an error when trying to update from version 25252 to version 25262.

“We couldn’t update system reserved partition”

This was kind of unexpected, really, until I found out that the SRT only had 5MB (this is not a typo) available. To resolve this, instead of playing around with some kind of partition manager, I decided to remove some unnecessary files. The font files in Microsoft/Boot/Fonts directory seemed like a good candidate for this.

Note: This only works if your partition is GPT. If you’re using MBR, the process is completely different

  1. Right-click on the Start button and click Terminal (Admin)
  2. Make sure you’re in a Dos Command Prompt and not in Powershell
  3. Type mountvol x: /s (I’m using x: here because I rarely use this drive letter to mount network drives)
  4. Go to the X drive. Type x: and press enter
  5. Navigate to the Fonts folder by typing “cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts” (no quotes) and press enter
  6. Now type “del .” (again, no quotes) and press enter. You will be asked if you’re sure, type Y and press enter again

Restarting the Insider Preview install now worked without issues.

Vintage Hardware

Drivers Windows XP x32 for Gericom X5-Force 1830

In the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s Gericom released various laptop models and was fairly popular in western Europe. These laptops were sold under the brands Gericom (mainly Germany), Advent (mainly in the UK and Ireland) and in Spain under a brand named Hundyx. (I’ve restored one Pentium III model of this brand a while back. Funnily enough I really can’t seem to find a lot about this brand name at all) This is probably not an exhaustive list, but this is what I encountered over my years repairing vintage (or just plain old) hardware.

This Gericom X5-Force 1830 DVD/CDRW built in 2002 came to me with the following specs:
– 14.1″ TFT
– Intel Pentium 4 Mobile CPU 1.80GHz
– 128MB RAM
– Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32M
– 30GB HDD

Since the HDD already made strange ticking noises and it took over 5 minutes before the Windows XP boot logo even appeared, before giving a BSOD on the harddisk, I decided to replace it with a 128GB mSATA SSD plugged into a 44PIN PATA/IDE SSD HDD adapter, since I had this laying around anyway from a previous failed laptop restore. Further specs on this laptop can be found here.
The reason for this post is mainly to make it easier for people to find the drivers for unrecognised devices within Windows XP x32 SP3 for this system.

Windows XP RTM installs easily on this system and without errors, but, as is usual with XP, some drivers are missing. Also, these are not included in any of the Service-Packs, neither the official SP3 nor the unofficial SP4 and End-of-Service Rollup. (There are boot issues with this model and the End-of-Service rollup package. Since I’m not connecting this OS to the internet, I will not install this) It has taken me some time to gather these as it’s not too easy to find anymore. I doubt these are the latest available versions, but these install properly and do the job.

The below is simply in alphabetical order. This does not mean the installation has to be done in this order. In fact, I would recommend to install each driver separately, leaving the OEM Port I/O driver for last, and reboot in between installations.

Of course I would NOT recommend connecting any unsupported Operating System version to the internet. Please download the drivers below onto a pen-drive and copy these over to the laptop that way.

Unrecognised devices:
Multimedia Audio Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059 = VIA AC’97 Enhanced Audio Controller
PCI Simple Communications Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3068 = Motorola SM56 Data Fax Modem
Universal Serial Bus (USB Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3104 = VIA USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller (It’s strongly recommended to have Windows XP SP1 installed. Finding the supportive USB driver files is going to be a bit of a pain otherwise)
Unknown device – ACPI\PNP030F = OEM Port I/O Driver (Note: Make sure you complete the full installation including the additional software. Windows may not start otherwise)
Unknown device – ACPI\VIA3076 = VIA Fast Infrared Controller
Video Controller (VGA Compatible) – PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0176 = NVIDIA GeFroce4 420 Go 32M (I advise to run the setup.exe to install the driver instead of right-clicking the device in the Device Manager and install from there. I observed some strange white-screen flickering when installing from the Device Manager)

Enjoy!

Vintage Hardware

Windows 98 issues on a Dell Latitude D600

Windows 98 Setup Freezes when “Setting up programs on the Start Menu”

When installing Windows 98 SE on a Dell Latitude D600, the installation freezes at the point after it finishes “Setting up programs on the Start menu” but before it installs Help. Rebooting the laptop does not help. It does a Scandisk, continues to setup, again wants the TimeZone settings, Control Panel and freezes again after finishing Setting up programs on the Start menu. The mouse cursor moves, but there’s no hard drive or CD-Rom activity at all.
Since this laptop doesn’t have an onboard floppy drive, I’m using an USB floppy and I left this connected for install. As soon as I realised that Windows 98 SE doesn’t have proper USB support, I disconnected the drive and rebooted. Now setup finished and Windows 98 properly configures itself and loads properly.

Windows 98 won’t shut down and hangs on the shutting down screen

This frequently happens on laptops that do not have ACPI installed. For the machine to shutdown properly, ACPI must be enabled. To enable ACPI, click start, run and type Regedit. Scroll down to the following key in the Windows registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Detect

Create a new DWORD value called “ACPIOption” and set it equal to 1.

In Control Panel, run Add New Hardware and click on “Hardware detection”. ACPI should now be detected and installed. After a system reboot all ACPI devices should be set up and Windows should shut down properly

Hyper-V

Windows 2000 on Hyper-V

Sometimes it’s necessary to install an old Operating System, but you really cannot (or don’t want to) get the old hardware out, even if it would still work.
I was in such a position that I had to install Windows 2000 Server. After locating the installation media, I decided it was a good idea to get it running on the 2019 Hyper-V cluster. This actually can be done, but there are a few hoops to jump through:

– The base VM must be setup with a legacy network card.
– Also the vCPU must be set to legacy mode for this VM.
– The Windows 2000 installation media must have SP4 slipstreamed.
If SP4 is not slipstreamed into the installation media, setup will not even properly start, but will Blue Screen with:

STOP: 0x0000001E (…) KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED on the driver acpi.sys

If you don’t have the original installation media with SP4 installed, you can download SP4 from WinWorldPC and slipstream yourself as explained here.

Creating the VM
This part is pretty much the standard process. I’ve named my VM: Windows 2000 Adv En, Generation 1 VM type, Startup Memory of 3072MB and make sure Dynamic Memory is turned off. Also leave the network card as Not Connected. (We’ll connect the NIC in a later stage)
Note: I’ve put the RAM to 3GB as Windows 2000 is a 32bit operating system and is not capable of addressing much more without some PAE trickery)

Create a new virtual hard disk. For Windows 2000 you don’t really need a lot, so I gave it 20GB. A lot more than it needs, but it doesn’t really matter. A fixed size seems to be the fastest for the installation, as the formatting of the disk during setup seems faster. Make sure you create a VHD and not a VHDX. The OS intermittently Blue Screens after the installation of the storage drivers when a VHDX is used.

Next remove the SCSI controller. Windows 2000 does not support this SCSI controller and will Blue Screen with:
STOP: 0xC0000263 {Driver Entry Point Not Found} The \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\storvsc.sys device driver could not locate the entry point ZwQueryFullAttributesFile in driver ntoskrnl.exe.

On the install options tick the box to install an operating system from a bootable CD/DVD-ROM, select Image File and browse to where the Windows 2000 iso is stored and click finish.

Enable legacy settings

The following step is to enable the vCPU legacy compatibility for Windows 2000. So open up Powershell in administrator mode and enter:

Set-VMProcessor <VM Name Here> -CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled $true

So in my case I type:

Set-VMProcessor “Windows 2000 Adv En” -CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled $true
(Notice the quotes. These are needed if you have spaces in your VM name)

If you need network access, you need to setup a legacy network adapter. In the Hyper-V manager select Settings for your VM and select Network Adapter. Click the Remove button. Now click on Add Hardware and add a Legacy Network Adapter. The NIC will stay disconnected if you don’t specifically connected to the virtual switch in the settings of the Legacy Network Adapter. If you have any further network configuration, like named vLANs, you can set these there.
Note: Since Windows 2000 (and this goes for Windows NT3.51, NT4 and 2003 as well) has not had any security patches for years and these were not known for a robust security to begin with, be very careful connecting a legacy VM like this one to the internet. Take extra steps to protect your network in these times of ransomware and other malicious software.

From here you can follow the normal setup process for Windows 2000 and this should succeed. During the setup of the operating system, the mouse is not going to be available. You will not be able to immediately add the server to a domain during setup either. The reason for this is that Server 2019 does not offer Windows 2000 compatible integration services. These will have to be installed manually after setup completes.
The latest installable integration services that will install most drivers on Windows 2000 are the vmguest.iso is for Windows Server 2008R2 (Linked below), but the 2008 version will work. Unfortunately Microsoft no longer officially hosts these on their webpage.

Various versions of the VM Guest tools:
Hyper-V2008-vmguest.iso
Hyper-V2008R2-vmguest.iso
Hyper-V2012R2-vmguest.iso

Product Keys for Windows 2000 (Taken from WinWorldPC):

Professional: RBDC9-VTRC8-D7972-J97JY-PRVMG
Server: H6TWQ-TQQM8-HXJYG-D69F7-R84VM
Advanced Server: WY6PG-M2YPT-KGT4H-CPY6T-GRDCY

Dosbox

Windows ME on Dosbox ECE, even on Raspberry Pi4b

If you search the web you’ll find a lot statements that the installation of Windows Millennium or Windows ME on Dosbox is just not possible, that it will not work, that it will not even complete setup, no matter what.
I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t found differently. Nowadays it is indeed possible to run Windows ME on Dosbox and, even though it’s not supported, it is fairly stable. At least more stable than I expected and a lot more stable than Windows 98SE on the same environment.

Now the question is “Why? Why would anyone want to install an OS that was (and still is) considered the second most horrible operating system ever released by Microsoft? (The first most hated is Windows Vista) The answer to that is simple: Because people said it could not be done while there is no logical reason for this not to work. Also I never developed a bias against it as I didn’t use it at the time. I had a dual-boot Windows 98SE/Windows 2000 workstation and before I finally got around installing ME, Windows XP was launched.

Anyway, below a quick and dirty video of Dune 2000 on Windows Millennium running on a Raspberry Pi4b with Dosbian 1.5 install. One of these days I’ll modify this post with a how-to installing Windows ME on Dosbox.

Synology NAS

Synology Drive App for Windows 10 does not connect

When trying to connect, the app displays a message:

Connection fail. Check your network settings and try again.

The solution to this is that next to port 5000 and 5001, the port 6690 also has to be opened to the Synology NAS. If this port is not opened, the Windows app will fail.

The Android and iOS apps will work with just port 5000 (or 5001 if SSL is selected and the certificate is valid).

Windows 10

Windows 10: Set search results default to detail view

For some reason Microsoft seems to think that “Content” view for search results is the best view. This goes for “generic” folders in general, but me for content view is a view that I’d rather see go completely from Windows. Unfortunately I for me there is no easy setting to change this. This means it’s time to dive into the Windows Registry a little and set everything to use Details view as default.

Folder views are user specific, local and are controlled by the Windows Shell. This means the registry keys can be found under:

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Setting\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell

Here you should remove the keys BagMRU and Bags. Once these two are removed, add the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell{7fde1a1e-8b31-49a5-93b8-6be14cfa4943}

Create 2 DWORD values with:

“LogicalViewMode”=dword:00000001
“Mode”=dword:00000004

Now log off and log back on and every window should be set to Detail view.

Games

Caesar IV – Runtime error on Windows 10

When trying to run the Steam version of Caesar IV on Windows 10, a runtime error will pop up and will close the game.

The Eventlog gives this:

Before immediately going for the refund, there are a few things that can be done to get this working. (this does not have to be done in this specific order, as long as it’s done before running the game again)

  1. In the folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Caesar 4\C4” right-click on the file: “RegisterDLL.bat” and select “Run as administrator”
  2. In the same folder, “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Caesar 4\C4” right-click on the file: “CaesarIV.exe”, click on Properties, there click on the “Compatibility” tab and select: “Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” and “Run this program as administrator” and click the Apply button.

3. Download and install “DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010)” from the Microsoft page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

The system does not have to be rebooted.

Note: This was tested on various versions of Windows 10 up to 20H2 fully patched until January 2021.
Updated on the 27th of January 2021

Windows 2000 Professional

Slipstreaming Service Pack 4 into Windows 2000

When installing Windows 2000 (and also Windows NT4 or Windows XP/2003 or even MS Office versions), it’s usually easier and less error-prone to install the OS with the latest service-pack or SP already slipstreamed into the installation media. Quite often this will resolve driver issues which may cause Blue Screens of Death during installation.
This guide assumes you already have a copy of the installation media and SP handy and further assumes you’re working on the D-drive. The mounted image or DVD drive is assumed to be the E-Drive. You can substitute the drive letters with whichever you’re using.

What do we need:
1) At least 1GB free space on the hard disk you’re working on
2) A CDR/CDRW drive to burn the CD or a USB Pendrive with sufficient capacity already made bootable before copying the slipstreamed image
3) A Windows 2000 installation disc or .iso image
4) A copy of Windows 2000 SP4 in the same language as the install media

From here I find it easiest to work with the command prompt. This is just a habit however and there is no real difference between working with the prompt or working with the GUI.

Mount the installation media and create a work-in-progress folder:
mkdir D:\Windows2000\i386
cd D:\Windows2000\i386

Copy the contents of the i386 directory of the installation media to the folder you just created with:
xcopy e:\i386 d:\Windows2000\i386 /e

The servicepack you downloaded, is usually an executable. You can extract this with typing the filename.exe -x, so in my case that is:
D:\SP4\w2ksp4_en.exe -x

You’ll get a popup box asking for the destination of the extracted files. I normally put these in the same directory, so I enter: D:\SP4 and click Ok.
Once this is completed, CD to the directory with the extracted files:
cd D:\SP4\i386\update

Now run the following command to update the Windows 2000 installation folder:
D:\SP4\i386\Update\Update.exe -s:D:\Windows2000
Note: There is a space between Update.exe and the -s switch, but there is no space between the -s and the destination. You don’t need to specify the i386 folder in the path here.

Once this has completed, copy the contents of the Windows2000\i386 directory to your bootable pendrive or burn it to CD/DVD.