Re: alt.hackers.discuss creation

Article: 8584 of alt.hackers
From: kisrael@diamond.tufts.edu (Kirk Israel)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: alt.hackers.discuss creation
Date: 15 Sep 1995 22:57:00 GMT
Organization: Tufts University
Lines: 71
Approved: Well, duh
Message-ID: 43d0bs$dqt@d2.tufts.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: diamond.tufts.edu
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

Randy Kaelber (kaelbers@avian.dars.muohio.edu) wrote:
: Andrew Berman (aberman@cs.washington.edu) wrote:


: > Well, there went the safety net for this group.  Thanks, Greg.

: Relax, Andrew! It's not like nobody has ever let slip part of the secret
: to posting.

Exactly- and while we still get a few too many people who just do it for
the sake of doing it, without any discussion or Obhack to add, I think it
works pretty well.

: Even the alt.hackers FAQ covers it at a high level. Anybody
: can also read RFC1036 which should probably be simple enough to figure
: out what needs doing. What's always been missing is the technical aspect of
: how to do it.

Which reminds me- what's the best place to find RFCs?  I haven't really
searched, but they're not really staring you in the face- so in that
case, RFC's aren't much of a give-away thanks to security by obscurity.
So where *should* I look?

: It's more difficult in some news packages than others (It's
: a breeze with tin).

Amen!

ObKludge^H^H^H^H^H^HHack
Got Windows 95 on a CD-ROM.  Didn't have a CD-ROM player so I rigged up
my Sony Discman to-- no, just kidding.

The install of Win95 went beautifully- except as soon as it tried to
load the task bar / Start button, it would crash, BOOM, leaving me with
nothing but a blank screen and useless mouse pointer.

After fiddling with this for far too long, I said to hell with it, I must
have something obscure in my win3.1 files that are screwing things up, and
damned if I know what it is.  So I ran UNINSTAL and cleared it out of
there.  I got my old 3.1 back, so I renamed my WINDOWS directory to
OLDWIN, and reinstalled 3.1 from the original floppies.  Great, i now
have a clean version of windows that would end up loading Win95 with no
problem.

The hack?  Trying to get the Hi-Res screen drivers from my old install
without the original disk, and without much knowledge of how Windows
keeps track of this stuff.  The description of the drivers (in the
Windows Setup program) has the word "Spider" in it, so I did
a recursive
grep on my OLDWIN directory for spider.  Voila, I found the files
OEM0.INF and OEM1.INF.  These told me the names of the .DRV files I
needed for each mode.

I was feeling lazy by this point, so instead of poring over the .INF
files to figure out what other files were I needed from my OLDWIN directory
that weren't in the WINDOWS directory, I installed each driver in
turn, without restarting Windows to let it take effect.  Luckily, when it
was missing an auxilary file for a specific mode, it would tell me the
file by name, and I could copy it over.

I then reinstalled Win95 from the clean 3.1, and it worked fine.

Sorry for the long winded description of a somewhat lame hack, but there
you are.
	(Windows 95 has enough troubles without being stuck in VGA mode ;-)
					-Kirk

--
_____
-O\O  Kirk Is		 Come visit the Blender of Love: NEW LOCATION
( = ) kisrael@tufts.edu    http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~kisrael/romance
"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea." --/usr/bin/fortune

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