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VirtualBox TLB flushing and SCANDISK not-sure-if-bug #38

@grawity

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@grawity

I'm running Win98 in VirtualBox on Windows 11 (with the 'native' VirtualBox VMM, not through Hyper-V). I've recently upgraded to a newer Intel CPU (3rd gen to 15th gen) and ended up needing the TLB patch.

Unfortunately after installing the latest patch (booting the VM from the .img and running patch9x), Win98 kept freezing on black screen at boot time (immediately after autoexec.bat codepage stuff and before returning to the boot logo), both on the new PC and on the old one. I had the mode con codepage lines and a blinking _ cursor and that's it. (Specifically, it did not print the "(Patcher9x) Registers clean" message.)

The cause of the hang seems to have been that I'd done a vboxmanage modifyvm Win98 --cpu-profile="Intel Pentium M processor 2.00GHz" a long time ago (to fix a different problem on the old PC). After switching to --cpu-profile="Intel Core Duo T2600 2.16GHz" (and later, removing the profile setting from Win98.vbox XML entirely) the hang went away.

But after that, there still seems to be an issue whenever Windows decides to run SCANDISK after unclean shutdown. The scan goes very slowly (at a rate of maybe 1% every 10-20 seconds, for a small 10GB disk that used to go through SCANDISK in seconds). If I hit 'Exit' it jumps to 85%, freezes for a moment, then dies with something like While initializing device SPOOLER: Windows protection error.

After one such SCANDISK run, I opened C:\SCANDISK.LOG and found it full of "Directory entry had an incorrect size" errors (an implausible amount) and all files I checked that it allegedly "fixed", actually ended up having extra garbage at the end, i.e. SCANDISK actually replaced the correct file size with incorrect for a ton of files.

Could it be that SCANDISK is also affected by the TLB flush issue or something similar, but starts before the patch can take effect?

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