Hi:
I think I have a simple question. I have the A7N8X motherboard,
version 2, with the original BIOS.
I also run win98se.
I also have a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 controller card that runs my
2 hard drives. (Both are 120Gb.)
Can this setup also run a large 200 or 250 Gb hard drive?.
I understand that there are some size limitations, but I don't
understand all the particulars.
Is there anyone out there who runs an A7N8X with Win98SE, and
they also have a super-large hard drive?
If this setup won't run a 200 or 250 GB drive, there what would
be the max size it could run?
Thank you VERY much for any advice or info.
Fred
The Microsoft KB isn't too much help. It talks about support in
WinXP and Win2K, but doesn't have much to say on previous OSes.
(Search for "enablebiglba" in the KB, if using those OSes.)
The concept to worry about, is 48 bit LBA. Logical block addressing
was introduced to handle an earlier "boundary" for disk size,
and I think the sector address was 28 bits. This was (3.5) 8 bit
registers worth. To get 48 address bits, (3) 8 bit registers are
written twice, to be able to send 48 bits. (The half a register
isn't used
Apparently, support for 48 bit LBA was introduced in the same
standard as ultra 133 transfer rates. So, that is why you would
normally expect your card to handle large disks. Ultra 100 devices
sometimes get support with a firmware/software upgrade, but it
isn't guaranteed.
However, as with any addressing issue, there are many places in
the BIOS, drivers, OS, applications etc. that can be incompatible
with such changes.
This page explains some of the issues. You should go to the Promise
site and see whether a newer driver is required or not. This page
claims that FDISK won't be able to partition the large disk, and I
don't know if that is an architecture issue or an implementation
issue.
http://www.48bitlba.com/win98hbp.htm
This KB article claims FDISK can handle up to 512GB:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;280737
I think the message here is, yes, you can install a disk larger
than 137GB, but there may be obstacles to it working. There
have been a few people posting in this group, who have struggled
mightily to get a large disk installed on their system, and
even though everything looks like it should work, it refused to
work properly. Other people are successful without too much
effort. In some cases, fooling around with Partition Magic
sometimes fixes up a disk that initially didn't work, but I don't
see any pattern to problems with large disks. The use of a
controller card, such as the one you've got, is used to work
around a motherboard BIOS that doesn't have support for 48 bit
LBA.
Even the Intel IAA had problems, and it was about a year after
48 bit LBA was popular, before a version of IAA was released
that supported the larger disks.
If you do decide to go with the large disk, I recommend after
you have partitioned it and formatted the volumes, that you
copy some dummy 1GB size files to the disk. If you can fill the
disk past the 137GB mark without the file system being corrupted,
then chances are you have a good install. (Some people have
done an install and after collecting 137GB of MP3's, had a
disk crash, so waiting to test this with valuable data isn't
recommended.) I copy the files and then run a checksum program
on all the (identical) files, to see whether the disk surface,
cabling, and controller electronics are OK. Takes a day or two,
but is worth it for the peace of mind.
If you want a copy of the standard, see
http://www.t13.org
Scroll to the middle of the page to see the list of drafts.
I've got a copy of d1410r3b to put me to sleep at night
There are some later ones than that.
HTH,
Paul
