LBA

[2112]

hi can anyone tell me what to do her

I run Win98 on my old pc on start up it tells me

"ScanDisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C.
This cluster is either damaged, or your system is not
configured properly. Drive C may need to have Logical
Block Addressing (LBA) enabled to work properly, or its
partition may be incorrectly marked as a non LBA
partition . Data loss can occur if your LBA setting or
disk partition for this drive is misconfigured"

I dont know what LBA is to start with so can you please
help me

 

[Bob Harris]

Logical Block Adressing.

This is a method by whihc the motherboard (BIOS) communicates with hard
drives. I believe that it was first used when drives exceeded the half-Gig
barrier, someitme around when win95 was popular. Of course, there is now
more than one flavor of LBA, each with its own maximum size limitation.
When win98 PC had a limit at 32Gig. Newer PCs have limits at 128 to 137
Gig, depending on how you define a Gig.

In all cases, to acces larger hard drives, you need to enable LBA in the
BIOS. The BIOS is more fundamental to the PC than is Windows. In fact the
same BIOS will work with LINUX or Windows. To access the BIOS setup, read
your PC/motherboard manual, or contact the support sebsite of the PC maker
or motherboard maker.

Severl words of caution: (1) Messing with the BIOS can render the PC
useless, so be careful. (2) If the PC was working fine, then it started
gicing error messages, it is more likely a disk problem (bad cluster) than a
BIOS problem. (3) If a new, larger hard drive was installed and that
started the error mesages, then a change to a BIOS setting may help. (4)
However, if the PC is very old, it may be impossible to get it to run
correctly with a larger disk connected to the motherboard IDE contollers.
Instead, you might have to install a PCI adpater card (ATA/100). (5) If
none of this makes sense, I sugges tthat you take the PC to a repair shop,
since randomly changing fundamental setting often results in disaster.