Making W98 ignore new hardware/automatically install drivers
Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 8:20 pm
Ok, so this is a question slightly unrelated to this forum, but given the amount of bright people around here maybe someone will have the answer.
I'm making a custom flavour of Windows 98 to be booted into a RAM disk using GRUB4DOS. GRUB4DOS, for those who don't know, is an extension of GRUB that goes beyond regular GRUB, and it can for example emulate a hard drive with a RAM disk by placing a real mode hook on some BIOS calls. And since Windows 98 is so DOS compatible, it will actually boot pretty much fine from that virtual hard drive. (I had to replace himem.sys with another xms manager, but apart from that it works fine)
However, it will naturally insist on detecting all new hardware in that machine, which makes booting it a pain. (I also want this thing to be arbitraily bootable, so just installing the drivers my machine needs is not an option)
So basically what I want to do is tell Windows 98 to ignore all new hardware it detects, which is not needed anyway.
The purpose of doing this in the first place is to aid people who are using certain LPT based devices which require direct user mode access and work much more stable under Win9x.
So to make this more useful I want to skip drivers for all hardware except for
*LPT Ports
*USB host controllers
*Keyboards/mice
*USB mass storage devices
Or even better to tell Windows to automatically look for drivers in a certain path, install the driver if found, otherwise skip that particular device.
Any ideas?
I'm making a custom flavour of Windows 98 to be booted into a RAM disk using GRUB4DOS. GRUB4DOS, for those who don't know, is an extension of GRUB that goes beyond regular GRUB, and it can for example emulate a hard drive with a RAM disk by placing a real mode hook on some BIOS calls. And since Windows 98 is so DOS compatible, it will actually boot pretty much fine from that virtual hard drive. (I had to replace himem.sys with another xms manager, but apart from that it works fine)
However, it will naturally insist on detecting all new hardware in that machine, which makes booting it a pain. (I also want this thing to be arbitraily bootable, so just installing the drivers my machine needs is not an option)
So basically what I want to do is tell Windows 98 to ignore all new hardware it detects, which is not needed anyway.
The purpose of doing this in the first place is to aid people who are using certain LPT based devices which require direct user mode access and work much more stable under Win9x.
So to make this more useful I want to skip drivers for all hardware except for
*LPT Ports
*USB host controllers
*Keyboards/mice
*USB mass storage devices
Or even better to tell Windows to automatically look for drivers in a certain path, install the driver if found, otherwise skip that particular device.
Any ideas?