disk capacity limit

  • Thread starter Thread starter adjin
  • Start date Start date
A

adjin

hello,
Is there any capacity limitation for hard disk drives under windows 98
or it's depends on system BIOS?
 
hello,
Is there any capacity limitation for hard disk drives under windows 98
or it's depends on system BIOS?
Click to expand...

Motherboard (or PCI ATA card) bios must support 48 bit LBA
at least, for any drive larger than 128GB.

Windows scandisk and defrag can't see beyond 128GB. It is
_required_ to use another 3rd party tool for these
functions, for example, Norton SpeedDisk and Disk Doctor
(either 2001 or 2002 was first version with support, and
newer versions).

FDisk users must specify a percentage of capacity instead of
fixed size.

IIRC, the IDE controller's windows driver need support 48bit
LBA, though most semi-modern drivers do... but then who
knows how old your box is, running win98 that could vary a
lot.
 
adjin said:
hello,
Is there any capacity limitation for hard disk drives under windows 98
or it's depends on system BIOS?
Click to expand...

If the PC in question is of 1997/1998 vintage, the BIOS may not support
48-bit LBA which is necessary for hard drives over 137GiB(128GB) in size.
Windows 98 can not see a larger drive than this. Even with a PCI controller
card, you would still need Windows 2000 SP3 or Windows XP SP1 to use the
full capacity of the hard drive.
The easiest answer is to use a 120GB hard drive.
 
adjin said:
hello,
Is there any capacity limitation for hard disk drives under windows 98
or it's depends on system BIOS?
Click to expand...
Kony's answer is spot on but as well as that, this website is a treasure
trove of info on just this topic and more: http://www.48bitlba.com/ . I had
a great deal of difficulty getting Win98SE to install with my 250 GB drive
so just bought Windows XP SP1a (which detected the full drive capacity right
off and installed without a hitch) - but them my machine is powerful enough
to run that OS even though my motherboard BIOS wont natively detect the full
drive capacity - its Intel 820 chipset based and using Intel Application
Accelerator for the 48 bit LBA part. I figured since the cost of the OS
(which I bought OEM with the motherboard) worked out cheaper than
partitioning software and utility software combined, I'd use it solely and
lets face it, it's much more pretty to use than 98.

Paul
 
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