98 Guy
2011-03-10 13:54:47 UTC
So, I may as well go big. But can Win98se handle a 250 or 500gb?
How many partitions would I have to make?
I'm happy with my 6 partitions. 7 or 8 would be ok too.
What are my limits?
If the hard drive is going to be directly connected to yourHow many partitions would I have to make?
I'm happy with my 6 partitions. 7 or 8 would be ok too.
What are my limits?
motherboard's IDE port, then the first question is - how old is your
motherboard?
If your motherboard was made in 2001 or 2002, or if your CPU is a
Pentium 2 or Pentium 3, then it's questionable if it can handle a hard
drive larger than 128 gb. If your motherboard was made in 2000 or
earlier, then almost certainly it won't be able to handle anything
larger than 128 gb. It doesn't matter how you partition it.
If your motherboard is based on an AMD cpu - well I don't know which of
them are equivalent to intel P2/P3 vs P4.
If you have a Pentium 4 (or Celeron) then you might be able to handle a
drive larger than 128 gb. If the motherboard was made in or after 2003
then almost certainly it can. If it was made in 2002 - then it's
questionable - but a BIOS upgrade should take care of it.
The determining factor is this: Is your motherboard capable of 48-bit
LBA drive access? There are several websites that focus on LBA-48, and
there are small utility programs you can run that will tell you if your
motherboard is capable of LBA-48.
Once you've determined that your motherboard is LBA-48 capable, then if
you want to run win-2k-sp4 or XP-sp1/2/3 (not XP-sp0) then you can use
any size IDE/PATA drive you want (but you'll probably have problems
finding anything larger than 500 gb IDE drive). For windows 98, the
problem with IDE/PATA drives is the 32-bit protected mode drive
(ESDI_506.PDR). It can't handle anything larger than 128 gb.
There are two possible choices for an alternate (modified) version of
ESDI_506.PDR file. One of them is public domain, which you can read
about here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=78592
And you can download here:
http://www.mdgx.com/files/ME48BLBA.EXE
The other alternative is a version provided by a person (Rlowe) which
you have to pay for (I think maybe $10 or $15). Offhand, I can't find a
direct weblink for him or his software (he offers a number of specially
modified files for win-98 that expand it's capabilities, such as be able
to use up to 4 gb of ram, etc). If you check out the MSFN.org forums
(win-98/me specifically) you'll find him there.
With that said, I personally don't mess around with IDE drives larger
than 80 gb on win-98 systems. Instead, I build win-98 systems using
motherboards that have integrated SATA controllers, or I install SATA
interface cards in PC's that don't have SATA ports.
With SATA, you will be using a driver supplied by the maker of the board
or the SATA controller chip, and these drivers don't have the LBA-48
problem. If you go the route of a SATA controller on a PCI interface
board, you'll have to find an older board, likely based on a SATA-I type
controller (SATA controllers can be of type SATA-I, II, or III and
differ primarily on data transfer speed). You may not be able to find
win-98 drivers for SATA-II/III controllers, but you will almost
certainly find them for SATA-I controllers.
Pretty much all motherboards made in or prior to 2006 (and possibly even
2007) that have integrated SATA controllers will be of type I, so using
them under win-98 is usually not a problem.
My experience with large hard drives running under win-98 is based only
on using SATA drives, and basically I can tell you this: The largest
drive that I've attached to a win-98 system so far is a Western Digital
1.5 TB drive. The largest drive (formatted as a *single* volume) that
I've installed and run windows 98 from was a 500 gb drive.
Technically, windows 98/me itself does not have a limition when it comes
to the size of hard drive or FAT32 volume that it can be installed on or
access. Rlowe believes that vfat.vxd does have a problem in some cases
if a volume is larger than 1 tb (but he offers a paid solution to that).
Some issues I've seen when it comes to owning large INTERNAL hard drives
for use on win-98 systems:
1) how to properly partition and format them as FAT32 volumes:
Solution: Use a program called "free fdisk" to partition them, and use
ordinary win-98 version of format.com to format them (yes, format.com
can format a 1.5 tb drive).
2) The win-98 DOS version of scandisk.exe has no problems analyzing or
fixing these very large volumes - contrary to Microsoft's own
documentation and statements.
3) Windows-based drive tools (like defrag and the GUI version of
scandisk) can operate on volumes that have a maximum of 32 million
clusters (regardless of cluster size). This is assuming you've taken
the win-me versions of scandskw.exe, diskmaint.dll, and defrag.exe and
copied them over to your win-98 system. Given 32kb cluster size, this
equates to a volume size of 1 tb.
So basically, the short answer is this:
You most probably do not have nor will you get a SATA controller for
your PC. So you will limit yourself to an IDE-type drive. So go and
buy a 160 or 250 GB IDE drive, and use fdisk.com (updated version from
Microsoft, with a file date of May 2000) and create what-ever partition
structure you want so long as you don't use more than the first 128 gb
of the drive. Leave the remaining space as unpartitioned.
You can create a single primary partion of 128 gb, or any combination of
primary and secondary partitions such that collectively they don't reach
beyond the first 128 gb of the drive. It can be tricky to figure out if
you've got that 128 gb number exactly correct - so you might want to
limit this to 120 gb.
If you want to be try the modified esdi_506.pdr I linked to above, then
go out and buy a 250 or 500 gb drive and format it any way you want
using the entire drive's space. I personally would not make partitions
or volumes smaller than 64 gb (too many logical drives given a 500 gb
drive).