HP200lx, LapLink and Windows 95

I have been able to get LapLink from the HP200lx and the Connectivity pack to work great under Windows 95. This includes having the HP200 show up as a drive under "MyComputer" and full support for drag and drop and the ability to open and save files on the HP from your Windows applications. I figured this out through trial and error, Microsoft Technet, the Microsoft Knowledge Base and a couple of ideas I received here on the HP Handheld forum. I would like to share these ideas and get input back from those that find other ways of doing this. Please E-mail me with ideas and comments at 71533.2001@compuserve.com.

Getting LLRA to load;

As you know if you tried, LapLink does not load or run under Win95. The LapLink Remote Access Icon installed by the Connectivity Pack reports something along the lines of "insufficient resources to load LapLink Remote Access". The solution is to load LLRA.bat under DOS before loading Windows 95.

Loading LLRA.bat from a DOS prompt within Win95 does not work. You must load LLRA.bat from the CPACK200 directory before loading Win95. There are four ways to do this.

First and easiest but least convenient is to hit the F8 key during the two seconds that the banner "Starting Windows 95" appears during bootup. From the menu that follows select "Command Prompt Only". Load LLRA.bat by typing LLRA in the CPACK200 directory, then type WIN to start Win95.

The second way is to edit MSDOS.SYS which under Windows 95 is not a system file but a configuration file. Make a backup copy of MSDOS.SYS then open it in edit or notepad, find the line "BootGUI=1" and change the line to "BootGUI=0". This will cause your machine to boot to the DOS prompt rather than to Win95. You then can start Win95 by typing "win" after you do whatever you need at the DOS prompt.

The third way is also easy. Just select shutdown Windows the select "Restart in MS-DOS Mode". Load LLRA.bat then return to Win95 by typing "win" at the DOS prompt. This method is best for those who may just use LapLink sporadically.

The fourth way is to add the following lines to autoexec.bat;

cd\cpack200
call LLRA.bat
cd\

YOU MUST ESTABLISH THE LINK TO THE HP200 BEFORE STARTING WINDOWS. If the HP200 link is not established before starting Win95 the ability to make a link is sporadic at best. However if you make the link before starting Win95 you can break the link and reattach reliably as often as you like. In other words if you established the link before starting Win95 you can shut off and disconnect the HP200 and then reattach it later without restarting Win95. The drive mappings to the HP will disappear and reappear in "My Computer" as necessary.
So before starting LLRA.bat using any of the above methods you should have the HP200 attached to the Win95 machine and have LapLink running on the HP. And you should wait the 3 to 5 seconds for the connection beeps before typing "win" to start Win95.

Making LLRA a Windows 95 compliant driver;

You will receive the following error message when starting Windows 95 with LLRA loaded.

"Windows 95 has detected a new real mode driver "LLRA3" that may affect system performance, would you like more information". LLRA3 is not considered a "safe" protected mode driver under Windows 95 and will force Win95 to run under its slower real mode disk drivers which can negatively affect performance.

The solution is to lie to Windows 95 and tell it that LLRA3 is indeed a safe, tested driver and to run it though Win95's protected mode disk and file access. We lie to Win95 by doing the following. Win95 keeps a list of "safe" DOS drivers in a file in the windows directory called "LOS.INI". Simply make a backup copy of los.ini then open it in any text editor such as edit or Windows notepad and add the line LLRA3.EXE under the section title [SafeList]. The next time you start Win95 it will now treat LLRA as a safe driver and run under optimal performance with it loaded.

THIS IS THE ONLY PARAGRAPH THAT I FEEL NEEDS A DISCLAMER. I have tested LLRA under Windows 95 protected mode drivers on three machines. I cannot guarantee safe results with whatever combination of drivers you may have on your machine. Remember messing with disk drivers can result in data loss. I have no idea why Microsoft or HP/Traveling software did not test this driver. I can only conclude by its absence from the "UnSafe" driver list that it was simply never tested as opposed to being unsafe. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q130179 and the Microsoft Windows 95 resource kit for more information.

I also recommend setting the "Idle-connection timeout" on the HP200 to its maximum of 60 minutes. If the HP shuts off automatically reestablishing the connection is not reliable. If you shut off the connection by hitting F8 or shutting down LapLink on the HP getting the connection back is pretty reliable.

Mapping Drives;

OK so now you can use LapLink from Win95 but all those nasty drive mappings from the HP screw up your network drive mappings. By default LLRA and your HP200LX map the HP's A, C, D, and E drives to your Win95 machine. If your normal Novell or NT drive mappings start at F: LapLink will conflict with them and cause all sorts of trouble. For instance if your Win95 machine has one hard drive and two CDROM drives it has already used up the available drives to drive E:. LapLink comes along and maps four more drives up to drive I:. Then your network administrator (me) has set all the default login scripts to start at F: and we now have problems. Using the LLRA control panel from Windows allows us to fix that by specifying what drives to map and where. However remember the whole reason for this "how to" file is that the LapLink Control panel does not run under Win95. So here are the following two suggestions. One I found myself and the other I owe to Alexander Gutfeldt, a user here on the HPhandheld forum.

Map only the drives on the HP that you need to see. I only need to see the C: drive on the HP200 so that I can transfer data, open files and do backups. To turn off all other drives from mapping edit the TSI.INI file on your HP200lx. The TSI.INI file can be found in C:\_dat\llraserv\. No need to backup the TSI.INI file before you edit it, there is a safe copy in read-only memory on your D: drive. To just map the C: drive add or edit this line from the second section of TSI.INI, [ReDirector], on the HP to say.

Private=ABDE
To map the HP's A: and C: drive,
Private=BDE

I never map the A: drive however, if I need to back up a memory card or need the data from it I'll just put it in my Toshiba notebook.

That cuts down on the number of drives being mapped. However it might also help to specify as what drive letter we want it to map to. I map the HP200 to drive H: on my Toshiba since its easy to remember and its the only drive letter none of the five or six networks I plug into use. To map the HP200 to a specific drive letter add the following lines to the TSI.INI file in the CPACK200 directory on the Windows 95 machine. These lines must be LAST in the file.

[Mappings]
HP200=0000000C000000000000000000 000

The name "HP200" must match the exactly the name that the HP200 uses, this can be set on the HP200 under LapLink settings. The default however appears to be HP200. The drive mapping line you will notice has twenty six places followed by a space and three more digits. I have no idea what the last three digits do but the first twenty-six represent A through Z. Just edit that line to put the HP200 drive to map (in this case C:) in the ordinal place of the letter you want it to map at. The above example has my HP's C: drive mapping at my Toshiba's H: drive. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet so C is put at the eight position in the mapping order. You can add other drives from the HP at other places in the map.

I hope this file helps others get the most out of Windows 95 and their HP200LX. If you have any suggestions or comments about this file please remember to drop me a note.

Pete Jordan
71533,2001 Compuserve