Fravia's TOOLS OF OUR TRADE Messageboard ~ Moderated Re: SoftIce Initialization
Thursday, 21-Jan-99 10:48:28

Thanks to the Owl! On restarting Windows 95 in MS-DOS mode and entering the Winice comand manually I was able to start SoftIce.

However, I appear to have a system instability because sometimes SoftIce initialization would fail because it said it could not find Windows. Seems that some fundamental system info gets progressively screwed up on my system as it runs, causing problems with task terminations, system shutdowns, and restarts. Also restart in MS-DOS mode is NOT a full reboot. I have always found such fast boots on IBM PCs to be very unreliable.

The central system management in Windows 95 appears to be an extreme kludge with all its modes and restart options.

I don't have a pressing need to develop device drivers where you would need tools like SoftIce. However, I am finding that quite apart from the use of a tool like SoftIce for program cracking, there is a legitimate need for debugging programs without source code to solve problems in routine installation and operation. Also most vendor debugging tools such as in VC++ assume that one has complete source because it is assumed that you are developing the entire program yourself. This is often not true with the increasing use of third party modules. Vendor debugging support also tends to be much weaker when it comes to multiple modules, such as the ubiquitous DLLs.

So whether vendors like it or not, developers and users have to become crackers just to solve operational problems. I was able to solve one the other day when installing Apple Quicktime 3.0, where the install was failing with an incorrect diagnostic because the Netscape plugin directory was not specified correctly.

AJR


Alan J. Robinson