larrymoencurly said:
But I'm using really old Windows 98SE, and
www.48bitlba.com says
anything older than Windows 2000 won't handle > 137GB without a
Windows driver, and they mention the Intel Applications Accelerator
for mobos with Intel chipsets (only 810 and newer -- no 440BX support
) and PCI IDE cards like the ones from Promise.
Well, just saying 'driver' doesn't quite tell the story.
There's more than one thing that must support the drive for it to all come
together. First is the controller (this one is the 'secret' and more on
that later). If it's the mobo's integrated IDE interface then that means
the BIOS must support it. If it's an add-in controller then 'it' must
support larger than 137 GB drives and the BIOS is irrelevant (which is one
reason people add in IDE controller cards).
I presume you're trying to use the onboard IDE channels and that your BIOS
supports greater than 137GB drives since you've focused on Windows98SE.
While the Windows98SE FAT32 file system can support > 137GB drives,
scandisk and defrag can not. They are 16 bit programs and, as a result, are
limited to 127 GB. That is not a typo, 127GB. If, however, you got over the
other issues one could presumably use a third party defrag and scandsk
equivalent that did not have the limitation (I have not personally checked
for one so I can't say what to get although I would 'imagine' that Norton
SystemWorks would operate correctly). Seagate recommends that you partition
the drive so that none are larger than the 127GB native limit (like make
two 80GB partitions on a 160GB drive) so this is easy to work around.
Now we get to the 'secret'. The native Windows98SE ATA/IDE drivers can not
handle more than 137/127 GB, as was the case with scandisk and defrag. So,
if your oboard IDE controller uses the standard windows drivers you are out
of luck because MS has no plans whatsoever to 'upgrade' Windows98SE (or,
rather, the 'upgrade' path is to buy XP). Note that this is not a matter of
partition size that can be solved by simply making them under the 127GB
limit, as was the case with scandisk and defrag. The partition information
is simply telling the driver where it's located on the disk, and it's size,
but if the driver can't GET to that portion of the raw disk then it can't
talk to it. So the native Windows98SE IDE driver limit of 127GB is a HARD
limit.
IF, however, your motherboard has an IDE controller where they provide
their own drivers (like maybe VIA or SIS) then it depends on whether THEY
have a driver that supports > 137 GB drives (or simply use the native
windows drivers). As a note, if it's an Intel IDE earlier than the 800
series then there isn't one and they don't plan to 'upgrade' the older ones
just as MS doesn't plan to 'upgrade' Win9X.
There is, of course, the option of an add-on IDE card that would have a
suitable driver. They typically represent themselves to the system as SCSI
devices, even though the hardware interface to the drive is IDE, and
Windows has no limitation problems with SCSI.
Which then leaves FDISK, which doesn't work with drives over 64GB (FORMAT
displays incorrectly over 64GB but formats correctly nonetheless). MS has a
'fix' for FDISK here...
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044
But that does not allow greater > 137GB partitions nor does it work with >
137 GB drives, or so MS says. You'd need a third party partitioning package
for that (perhaps the drive's prep program that came with it).
Since you say you have a BX chipset the solution is to either upgrade to
WindowsXP or buy a third party add-on IDE card that supports > 137 GB
drives and then partition the drive with multiple < 127GB partitions.
