Win98se and 48 bit LBA

S

sleepy

Apologies if covered previously, no time to keep up lately.

After reading one page on the hard drive limit for win98 and drivers
over (is it) 137GB, I am more confused than before.

I want to buy a 160GB or larger HD and use it on a win98SE box.

None of my partitions will be over 100GB, so am I safe to use such a
drive? Bios is good to 137GB I believe and can be upgraded easily for
larger drives.

Do I need to upgrade the bios first before installing it? Or can I just
go ahead with a good partitioning utility (not fdisk) and partition the
new drive?
 
R

Rod Speed

sleepy said:
Apologies if covered previously, no time to keep up lately.
After reading one page on the hard drive limit for win98 and
drivers over (is it) 137GB, I am more confused than before.
I want to buy a 160GB or larger HD and use it on a win98SE box.
None of my partitions will be over 100GB,
so am I safe to use such a drive?

Nope. The limit applys to the physical drive, not the partition.
Bios is good to 137GB I believe and can
be upgraded easily for larger drives.
Do I need to upgrade the bios first before installing it?

SE isnt supported for drives over 137G
Or can I just go ahead with a good partitioning
utility (not fdisk) and partition the new drive?

Nope, the limit applys to the physical drive, not the partition.

http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm
 
J

Jonny

sleepy said:
Apologies if covered previously, no time to keep up lately.

After reading one page on the hard drive limit for win98 and drivers
over (is it) 137GB, I am more confused than before.

I want to buy a 160GB or larger HD and use it on a win98SE box.

None of my partitions will be over 100GB, so am I safe to use such a
drive? Bios is good to 137GB I believe and can be upgraded easily for
larger drives.

Do I need to upgrade the bios first before installing it? Or can I just
go ahead with a good partitioning utility (not fdisk) and partition the
new drive?

You don't need a bios upgrade to use the physical capacity of the hard drive
to 132GB of total capacity.

My own experience show in 98SE, if you use such a drive fully partitioned to
its capacity, any number of partitions, and, if you save data in excess of
128GB, you'll have file data and FAT corruption at that point.
 
S

sleepy

Nope. The limit applys to the physical drive, not the partition.

Thanks for the replies from Rod and Johnny. Judging from the incomplete
instructions at http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm#novice I might be
better off just buying a smaller drive, since I have no plans to go to a
later version of windoze.

There is both a bios upgrade for large drives and a chipset upgrade for
my gigabyte MB, so I don't know if I should use both or just the bios
upgrade.

Anyone know if most of these larger drives, was looking at a 160GB
Seagate, have controller cards for them to support the 48bit standard?

Plus I'm using a fairly early version of bootit ng so, who knows how it
will interact with a 48bit based drive.

Can anyone say built in obsolescence?
 
R

Rod Speed

sleepy said:
Thanks for the replies from Rod and Johnny. Judging from the
incomplete instructions at http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm#novice I
might be better off just buying a smaller drive, since I have no
plans to go to a later version of windoze.

There is both a bios upgrade for large drives and a chipset upgrade
for my gigabyte MB, so I don't know if I should use both or just the
bios upgrade.

Academic if you are going for a smaller drive or a controller card.
Anyone know if most of these larger drives, was looking at a 160GB
Seagate, have controller cards for them to support the 48bit standard?

Yes, they are available. That is the main way
to use the larger drives with SE.
Plus I'm using a fairly early version of bootit ng so,
who knows how it will interact with a 48bit based drive.
Can anyone say built in obsolescence?

It isnt built in, its inevitable with an industry that moves so fast.

There wont be another with hard drives any time soon.
 
F

Folkert Rienstra

sleepy said:
Thanks for the replies from Rod and Johnny.

Thanks that they obviously don't deserve since they both had it wrong.
Judging from the incomplete instructions at http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm#novice

What incomplete instructions.
I might be better off just buying a smaller drive, since I have no
plans to go to a later version of windoze.

The only difference between novice user and advanced user
is that they don't trust the novice users to buy an add-in
controller -that you get with some bundled drives- themselfs.
There is both a bios upgrade for large drives and a chipset upgrade for
my gigabyte MB, so I don't know if I should use both or just the bios
upgrade.

Anyone know if most of these larger drives, was looking at a 160GB
Seagate, have controller cards for them to support the 48bit standard?

http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm#advanced paragraph 1.
Plus I'm using a fairly early version of bootit ng so, who knows how it
will interact with a 48-bit based drive.

Doesn't make any difference how old it is. Bios will be the decisive point
here. And if the last partition starts within the 137GB limit range there is
no problem at all.
Can anyone say built in obsolescence?

Do I win a prize if I do?
 
F

Folkert Rienstra

Rod Speed said:
Academic if you are going for a smaller drive or a controller card.


Yes, they are available.
That is the main way to use the larger drives with SE.

So much for your earlier "SE isnt supported for drives over 137G",
just one post back.
 
S

sleepy

Thanks that they obviously don't deserve since they both had it wrong.

Well, I thank anyone who takes the time to reply and I consider all your
answers good ones actually.
What incomplete instructions.

I reread it again, and understand it better now, just I think their
writing clarity could be improved on.

The only difference between novice user and advanced user
is that they don't trust the novice users to buy an add-in
controller -that you get with some bundled drives- themselfs.

Yes, I saw that.
http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm#advanced paragraph 1.


Doesn't make any difference how old it is. Bios will be the decisive
point here. And if the last partition starts within the 137GB limit
range there is no problem at all.

So my better option is to buy the 160GB since it's on sale and just use
around 125GB and that's all, leave the rest of it untouched. That should
work under 98SE right?
Do I win a prize if I do?

yes, if you can say it three times real fast and then spell it
backwards.
 
R

Rod Speed

sleepy said:
Well, I thank anyone who takes the time to reply and I consider all
your answers good ones actually.


I reread it again, and understand it better now, just I think their
writing clarity could be improved on.



Yes, I saw that.


So my better option is to buy the 160GB since it's on sale and just
use around 125GB and that's all, leave the rest of it untouched. That
should work under 98SE right?

Yep, that will work fine.
yes, if you can say it three times real fast and then spell it backwards.

He fails, he's off his medication.
 
R

Rod Speed

So, I can install the 160 and just use 125GB
or so, leaving the rest untouched correct.
Yes.

I think the limit for win98SE is 127GB from memory?

The 127/138 is just the binary/decimal difference.

127 in fdisk.
 
J

Jonny

sleepy said:
<snip>


So, I can install the 160 and just use 125GB or so, leaving the rest
untouched correct. I think the limit for win98SE is 127GB from memory?

If you already have the 160GB drive in hand, yes. Smarter to get 120GB
drive for this specific situation you've described.

MS made available a link for 98/98SE/ME non-support yesterday including
security updates. This to emphasize what they've already published on those
OSes for future support.

Moving to XP SP1 or higher in the future, and utilizing the hard drive
mentioned may change your mind about its capacity choice.
 
F

Folkert Rienstra

sleepy said:
<snip>


So, I can install the 160 and just use 125GB or so, leaving the rest
untouched correct. I think the limit for win98SE is 127GB from memory?

137GB and it is that for all the Windowses where the standard MoBo
chipset IDE is concerned. It doesn't concern Add-in IDE controllers.
It depends on what you do next that you get 48-bit LBA support,
either by installing the necessary SP or add an IDE controller with
48-bit LBA support.
 
F

Folkert Rienstra

sleepy said:
Well, I thank anyone who takes the time to reply and I consider all your
answers good ones actually.


I reread it again, and understand it better now, just I think their
writing clarity could be improved on.

It's quite clear actually, rather it doesn't make sense. Somehow they
make it appear as if the bundled add-in card installs itself without user
intervention and that a novice user can't install one that he bought himself.
Now that is downright silly.
Yes, I saw that.

So you can forget about the novice user part.
So my better option is to buy the 160GB since it's on sale and just use
around 125GB and that's all, leave the rest of it untouched. That should
work under 98SE right?

Yup. Fdisk should show you just the 137GB if your BIOS doesn't support
48-bit LBA. If it does support 48-bit LBA, then don't use the extra capa-
city in Windows unless you also have 48-bit LBA capable drivers, like Intel
Accellerator or an 48-bit LBA Win98 driver enabled add-in controller.
Also avoid using utilities like say partitioners or other utilities that aren't
bound by drive letters that act like they use BIOS but actually use the
windows driver.
yes, if you can say it three times real fast and then spell it backwards.

I'll consider it if you say what prize.
 
S

SpaceButler

137GB and it is that for all the Windowses where the standard MoBo
chipset IDE is concerned. It doesn't concern Add-in IDE controllers.
It depends on what you do next that you get 48-bit LBA support,
either by installing the necessary SP or add an IDE controller with
48-bit LBA support.

Yes. That's what I do.

I have several Win98 machines running as file archives with 160, 200, 250,
and 300 GB drives. You do need a 48 bit on-mb bios or a 48 bit pci
controller. Some of the motherboards mfg'd in 2000 or after can be bios
upgraded to 48 bit. Just depends.

With all the upgrades, the Win98 file system will handle FAT32 partitions
over 137 GB - - But you can't use it! The reason is the utilities
necessary to maintain the disk, scandisk and defrag, are old and written
using 16 bit internal addressing for checking clusters and limits the FAT
size in memory to something like 62 or 63 MB. Scandisk has to be able to
run in DOS mode. This has been discussed here before and is documented in
the Microsoft KB.

Here's how I partitioned a WD 300 GB disk:
36481cyl x 255hd x 63spt = 286,168MB = 279.46GB

Partition StartCyl DecSize GB ClusterSize FatSize
1 pri 0 31.182 G 28.3 16K ~ 7.4 MB
2 ext 3791 134.442 G 125.209 32K ~15.7 MB
3 ext 20136 134.442 G 125.209 32K ~15.7 MB

I'm thinking there was 2G of safety before it clobbered. I got tired of
finding the exact cutoff point over a range of possible configurations
everytime I got a new drive, so I settled on 125GB as working anywhere.
127GB max is about right.

Some partitioning utilities will insist on using 16K clusters on the 125GB
partition. I found these cause scandisk to hang and give out of memory
errors.
 
A

Antoine Leca

En SpaceButler va escriure:
Some partitioning utilities will insist on using 16K clusters on the
125GB partition. I found these cause scandisk to hang and give out
of memory errors.

You can report to the providers as bugs.

That is documented in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006:
: The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft
: Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory
: block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The
: Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using
: the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB
: in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses
: 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the
: FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters
: (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves,
: this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size
: of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).

Of course, with 16 KiB per cluster, maximum size drops down to 63.78 GiB.


Thanks for this fine point, I have to update my tool then...

Antoine
 
S

SpaceButler

En SpaceButler va escriure:
Some partitioning utilities will insist on using 16K clusters on the
125GB partition. I found these cause scandisk to hang and give out
of memory errors.

You can report to the providers as bugs.

That is documented in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006:

[snip]

Thanks for this fine point, I have to update my tool then...

The directory structure is oriented to clusters. What happens if some
great partitioning utility has the ability for the user to set 64K or 128K
clusters? Is there any reason scandisk would not work with those?

If it does work, then the size of a partition can increase to 255.06 GB or
even 510.12 GB. This would be perfect for large drives storing large
files. I don't think one should put the OS on a partition like that. You
would still be limited to a Win98 max file size of 4GB.

For the fun of it, I did format the 300GB drive as one large partition. (I
forgot the cluster size, though the fat was huge.) Win98 seemed to store
files properly and could read them, but of course, I could not run
scandisk. I did not try to fill the disk up, so I can not say for sure
there was no wrap-around at the 127GB point or the 28-bit addressing point
(125GB).

There may be a partition table limitation. It is worth an experiment.
 
A

Antoine Leca

En SpaceButler va escriure:
The directory structure is oriented to clusters. What happens if some
great partitioning utility has the ability for the user to set 64K or
128K clusters? Is there any reason scandisk would not work with
those?

I guess 16-bit Scandisk will have problem to load a 64K (or worse a 128K)
cluster in memory; my recollection is that Scandisk does not use the "huge"
model for that (since the performance hit would be dramatic).
Since it is required to do that to analyse at least the folder structure, I
would think this will hang.
Several similar tools will have similar problems.


OTOH, as far as I know one can disable Scandisk at boot
(inside MSDOS.INI, AutoScan=0).


Also, once you avoid Scandisk at boot and use only 32-bit tools, I do not
see why the "traditional" setup with 32 KiB or even 16 KiB clusters, and
hence huge (>16 MiB) FAT, could be a problem...
Also see below your experiment.


By the way, the 16 MiB limit is purely a matter of compilers used (which
memory manager targetted the 80286 and where not updated). Using other
schemes while still using 16-bit code, one can go upwards until 256 MiB
without too much of a problem (256 MiB is a limit for two reasons: one is
that it correspond to 64Ki pages of 4KiB each, and also it fills half of the
LDT, the part which is not used for the shared descriptors.)
My guess is that except internal tests at MS, nobody will.

If it does work, then the size of a partition can increase to 255.06
GB or even 510.12 GB. This would be perfect for large drives storing
large files.

Perhaps. I would be happy to hear about experimentations here. But I am not
holding my breath.

I don't think one should put the OS on a partition like that.

Surely not! the code which is loading DOS then VMM and the VxDs is in very
wide part still 16-bit code, and much of it is dealing with directories and
cluster content, and it definitively would not like having to deal with
clusters bigger than its internal buffers (something as easy as seeking
IO.SYS in the root directory is already a problem.)

You would still be limited to a Win98 max file size of 4GB.

I seem to remember there is a limit around 2 GiB (signedness).
Could be wrong, though.

For the fun of it, I did format the 300GB drive as one large
partition. (I forgot the cluster size, though the fat was huge.)
Win98 seemed to store files properly and could read them,

Once you have booted, Windows is running with 32 bits code, which does not
have any problem of any kind (except at 2/4 GiB, but this is one was solved
long ago.)

There may be a partition table limitation.

Yes, but it is quite a bit higher. The limit is using 32-bit numbers for
sectors, so this translates to 2048 GiB or 2 TiB. Note this limit is inside
the partition table (MBR), but it is also replicated in several places, such
as in the boot record for the file system, so it is quite of a hard limit
for FAT.
It is worth an experiment.

It would cost a bit (e.g., with four 500GB disks in hardware RAID0/JBOD you
are still below the mark), but this can be tested yet. It raises a number of
funny problems, BTW. I have no idea how Win9x could react... nor am I rich
enough to give it a try.


Antoine
 
E

Eric Gisin

Antoine Leca said:
En SpaceButler va escriure:

I guess 16-bit Scandisk will have problem to load a 64K (or worse a 128K)
cluster in memory; my recollection is that Scandisk does not use the "huge"
model for that (since the performance hit would be dramatic).
Since it is required to do that to analyse at least the folder structure, I
would think this will hang.
Several similar tools will have similar problems.

There is no FAT32 128KB cluster size.
The only reason 64KB is a problem on Win 9X is the Win16 API that reports free space.
Many setup apps are 16-bit and some do not correctly compute clusters*size correctly.
 

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