Windows 98SE, 48-bit LBA support for 137gb+ drives?

[TargaX]

Hi all. Been reading and reading, but can't find the answer to my specific question. Seems that everyone assumes that if you have a hard drive over 137gb, you're going to attempt to access all portions of the hard drive with Win98 (which I'm not). So... I have a "techie question":

250gb hdd. Partitioned and formatted in the following manner:

Primary Partition (Win98SE going here): 15gb

Extended Partition/Logical drives (in this order):

15gb NTFS

32gb FAT32

32gb FAT32

32gb FAT32

50gb NTFS

50gb NTFS

98SE will be insalled on the 15gb primary partition. WinXP will be installed on the first logical drive of the extended partition (dual-boot system). Notice that the FAT32 logical drives on the extended partition do not cross the 137gb mark. 15+15+32+32+32= 126gb. Past the 126gb mark are the two final NTFS volumes.

Motherboard BIOS supports 48-bit LBA. IDE controller (Intel ICH5R) supports 48-bit LBA. Under other circumstances, using Intel's Application Accelerator would guarantee 48-bit LBA compatibility with Win98, but this chipset is not supported by IAA (there's only a RAID version of IAA for this chipset). So my question is this:

As long as I do not create a FAT32 logical drive past the 137gb "barrier" on this hdd, will Windows98SE accurately read and write to the drive? Seems logical, but I'd rather have a definitive answer before I trust my data to a "maybe" guess.

Thanks!

[mjc]

Hi all. Been reading and reading, but can't find the answer to my specific question. Seems that everyone assumes that if you have a hard drive over 137gb, you're going to attempt to access all portions of the hard drive with Win98 (which I'm not). So... I have a "techie question":

250gb hdd. Partitioned and formatted in the following manner:

Primary Partition (Win98SE going here): 15gb

Extended Partition/Logical drives (in this order):

15gb NTFS

32gb FAT32

32gb FAT32

32gb FAT32

50gb NTFS

50gb NTFS

98SE will be insalled on the 15gb primary partition. WinXP will be installed on the first logical drive of the extended partition (dual-boot system). Notice that the FAT32 logical drives on the extended partition do not cross the 137gb mark. 15+15+32+32+32= 126gb. Past the 126gb mark are the two final NTFS volumes.

Motherboard BIOS supports 48-bit LBA. IDE controller (Intel ICH5R) supports 48-bit LBA. Under other circumstances, using Intel's Application Accelerator would guarantee 48-bit LBA compatibility with Win98, but this chipset is not supported by IAA (there's only a RAID version of IAA for this chipset). So my question is this:

As long as I do not create a FAT32 logical drive past the 137gb "barrier" on this hdd, will Windows98SE accurately read and write to the drive? Seems logical, but I'd rather have a definitive answer before I trust my data to a "maybe" guess.

Thanks!

I will do a little testing to see if this works, but here's the jist of what would happen if it does not work:

if the LBA is only recognized as 32 bits by a certain piece of software, and you create a partition table and partition that reflects this, you will not be able to create more than 137GB of partitions. If you create the partitions witih a utility that does recognize 48-bit LBA, one of two things can happen to a ppiece of software that only recognizes 32-bit LBA. Either:

* It will integer overflow when attempting to access >137GB (on boot, when detecting partitions and such)

and thus crash or refuse to boot

* or, it will ignore the value in the partition table as invalid and proceed to do its own detection, likely overwriting data when it incorrectly detects the partition start and end values.

eg, if it does not support it, it probably won't work the way you are hoping and most likely will ruin data.

I'd suggest running this aging OS in VMware if you need it. anyways, I'm off to test this for you =)

Edit: No, windows 98SE and its updates do not officially support 48 bit LBA.

details:

With a properly partitioned drive (48-bit aware tool, acronis disk director 9):

* Installation successful. BSOD on start.

Edited November 3, 2005 by mjc

[TargaX]

Thanks for the quick response and for going through the trouble of testing!

Question though with regard to the test:

1. Do your test motherboard/BIOS and IDE controller both support 48-bit LBA?

2. Was the installation partition less than 137gb in size?

From the information I've been reading with regard to "how to install 98SE with 48-bit LBA support", it says to:

1. Create a partition smaller than the 137gb limit.

2. Install the OS.

3. Install Intel Application Accelerator.

With mobo/BIOS and IDE controller support, as well as IAA drivers, Win98SE has no problems with drives larger than 137gb.

So the only part that I'm missing from this equation is the IAA.

To test my theoretical setup, you'd need to have the primary partition (C: drive) at less than 137gb, and also have no FAT32 partitions on the drive above the 137gb barrier (ie: Only NTFS or unallocated space beyond 137gb).

-T

[eidenk]

To test my theoretical setup, you'd need to have the primary partition (C: drive) at less than 137gb, and also have no FAT32 partitions on the drive above the 137gb barrier (ie: Only NTFS or unallocated space beyond 137gb).

It's actually not 137 GB the limit but rather around 126GB (or around 137 billions of bites). Be carefull with that.

[The_Frag_Man]

I am using win98SE

I have a 160GB drive formatted to FAT32 on a windows XP computer, it comes up as 149GB in my computer. It seems to work properly, the only problem I have run into is that I can't run scandisk from within windows on the drive.

[rjz]

That's normal Old scandisk can't run on large partitions. I would partition the drive.