W98SE on HD >40GB

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Cecil
  • Start date Start date
Hi all,
I don't seem to be able to load W98SE on a 160GB Seagate except on
partitions less than about 8GB. I have W98SE on a 40GB Maxtor -
installed with no problems but no luck on the Seagate - installation
runs OK until tries to boot for the first time, then says "Error loading
user.exe"
Is there any way of overcoming this?
Thanks,
Alan
Click to expand...

The esdi_506 Driver in Win98SE cannot cope with the larger
drive. If you could multi-partition it and successfully get
W98 installed, it would have corruption problems as you
approached the 137GB data size mark for the drive. My
experience was that it would overwrite other partitions data
and leave the folder names and contents looking like a Japanese
newspaper.

There are several remedies available out there. You can search
for esdi_506.pdr and see what comes up. There were some
interesting discussions. I do not remember the particulars
regarding chipsets and the driver versions available. If you
are out of luck there, I may be able to find what you need in
some old archives. If I remember correctly, there is a driver
and utilities including a new scandisk.
Did this 2 yrs ago.
 
Which they got from the drive's partition bootrecord. Presumably the
partition was created in the DOS stage using your 48-bit LBA
compatible BIOS.




That's a little risky. Writing to over 137GB may over- write the
start of your drive and kill the partition.
Click to expand...
I haven't committed the drive to any data yet so the only thing I'll
lose is the time involved in trying these things out. Incidentally, the
version of FDSIK that W98SE uses, wants to check the "integrity" of the
drive every time I want to change the partitioning - takes ages :(
Yes, there is no other limit associated with Win98SE. If you are
suffering from one, then that must be it. *
Click to expand...
I'm not sure if the MoBo (M7NCG) has LBA48 or not. The bios (Award,
circa 2005) doesn't report the full size so that may be the problem.
Still, even with that I can't figure why this should affect
installing Win98 to a size restricted partition below 137 GB. Are you
sure it's not a one time fluke?
Click to expand...
Don't know - it's a brand new disk.
 
Andy said:
Windows 98SE installed without any problem on a Seagate ST3250823A
250GB drive connected to a BioStar K8NHA Grand motherboard. I used
fdisk (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263044) to create a single
250GB partition the disk, then formatted the partition, and finally
installed Windows.
Click to expand...

Got that - thanks. Will try it later but it looks now like the problem
is the MoBo - no LBA48 possibly.
Alan
 
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