Wolfgang16

BTW, I posted my setup here Now I figured out, what the error #110 in 16-bit version of PartitionMagic8 probably causes: As far as I know there are no two descriptions of the number of sectors in the partition table. The CHS description is meaningless here. But its looks like they are still using it: this is from the PM debug file: Disk 1: 243201 Cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track. BiosExtensions: 0x2100 Subsets (0x00000001): Access The BIOS supports INT 13h extensions for this drive. ============================ Partition Tables ============================== Partition -----Begin---- ------End----- Start Num Sector # Boot Cyl Head Sect FS Cyl Head Sect Sect Sects ---------- - ---- ---- ---- ---- -- ---- ---- ---- ---------- ---------- 0 0 00 [ 0 1 1] 0C [1023 254 63] 63 3907024002 [Large Drive Placeholders] 0 1 1 46592 254 63 Actual Values Error #110: Number of sectors in partition is inconsistent. ucSectors = 3907024002 end - begin = 748516482 Obviously PM8 takes the "Number of Sectors" and calculates: 3907024002 + 63 = 63 * 255 * 243201 This is stored in 16-bit variables which results in 243201 - 3 * 65536 = 46593 This is displayed as "Actual Value" of Cyl. Now it calculates back: 46593 * 255 * 63 -63 = 748516482 This is now compared to the initial value which is wrong and gives error #110. So PM8 only works with partitions up to 539GB. I can confirm that PM8 works with 500GB partitions. The problem is also discussed here: http://www.hwkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/storage-hard-drive/3596/Partition-Table-Problems-Number-of-sectors-in-partition There is it said that the 32-bit version of PM8 does not have this problem. I like the GUI of PM8, it prevents me from entering something wrong. So its a pity that this stupid and senseless check restricts the usability of PM8. Nevertheless I was able to use it to partition my drive. I have now a small 8MB hidden primary and the big rest is divided into 2 logical drives of equal size, so that I am able to use scandskw. PM8 rejected to format FAT32, so I did it with fat32format under XP. So I have 2 questions to the community 1. I used a partitioning program which has obviously problems with big drives, but I checked the partitions with Free Fdisk, Win XP partitioner, Paragon Partition Manager 11 and Easeus Partition Master 8. None of them reported an error. Is this safe now or can there still be a pitfall? 2. Initially I tended to prefer a modern partitioner, but the negative experience with Paragon Partiton Manger 11 let me hesitate. Do you think that modern partitioners can generate partitions which look faulty under DOS?

I use a Dawicontrol DC-150 vers 1.1 card to drive one 2TB HD. It has a SiI 3112A chip. The drivers I got from the manufacturers site at http://www.dawicontrol.com/html/raid.shtml Note that this is a somewhat older page, which you cannot access from their main site. If you scroll down to DC-150 RAID, you find the raid driver: Dawicontrol RAID BIOS 3.54 32-bit RAID Treiber Windows 2000/XP/Server2003/Vista 1.0.60.0 Although it does not say "Windows 98" the dc150drv.zip includes a Win98 driver. Some of the files have later versions than what has been posted here so far. I also use the BIOS 3.54, which is included. So far I have only one issue with this card: the computer does shut down but it does not switch off. Regarding the question raid vs non-raid: The manual says, that the BIOS of the card can be disabled by a jumper, but this should only be made in case of booting problems and in this case one would need the special non-raid driver. There is also an option to deactivate the BIOS by the flash program. Is this case one has to use the raid driver. Non-raid drivers can also be downloaded from the PCMCIA page http://www.dawicontrol.com/html/pcmcia.shtml May be these PCMCIA cards don't have a BIOS? Wolfgang

Hello all, I have got a Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drive. It has 3.907.029.168 sectors of 512 byte size; thats 2000,4GB or 1.907.729,1 MiB. Let me just tell you what I have done: I formatted the HD with Paragon Partition Manager 11 under XP USB ( 1 extended Partition and 1 logical drive). Under Win98SE that worked, but the drive could not be used under DOS and scandskw and defrag reported "not enough memory", as known. Also behavior of DOS scandisk was odd. Partition Magic 8 reported errors like "wrong order" and "partition does not start at cylinder boundary", although is seems to show the correct size of the drive. Probably Paragon Partition Manager 11 uses a new kind of partitioning scheme instead of the old CHS. After that I used Free Fdisk 1.2.1 to delete that partition and made a new one. It reported total disk space 1.907.734 MiB and the extended partition had 1.907.721 MiB. I made 2 logical drives of equal size and formated the 1st one with format.com from BHDD31. This went through in about 2 hours and the partition was fine in DOS as well as in Win98SE. scandskw and defrag worked. Next I tried again Norton Partition Magic 8 (the DOS version). To be successful I had to delete everything with fdisk. But then PM8 accepted the disk and reported 1.907.726,6 MB, which I think should be MiB and is 243201 * 255 * 63 * 512 byte. I was even allowed to partition it and I did a small 8MB primary formated FAT, followed by an extended with logical drive but unformated. This went through and the logical drive had 1.907.718,7 MB (MiB?). The 8MB primary was usable, but a sys D: failed and when reentering PM8 it did not accept its own work: error #110: partition table number of sectors is inconsistent. Free Fdisk 1.2.1 confirmed the work which PM8 had done and reported the same size (1.907.719 MiB). Next again Free Fdisk 1.2.1: I deleted everything and made 1 logical drive with fdisk. This time it reported 1.907.719 MiB as size of the drive, which is same as PM8, but 2MB less than it did itself in the first step. I formatted this with format.com from BHDD31. It said "formatting 1.86G" ( 1860G would be correct) and after 3 hours the % counter wrapped around, but after 4 hours format was successful. The partition seems to be fine under Win98SE (size 1,81TB). Wolfgang

Hello, internal data of the new Seagate 3TB USB drive has just been published here: Link These data include a dump of the first 1MB of the drive and can be downloaded Download May be this can also help for Win98.

Hi all, I got an 500GB IDE drive WD5000AAKB, made in XP one extended partition including one logical drive. I formatted it using fat32format -c32, i.e. with 16kB clusters instead of 32KB, so it has 30,508,600 clusters. Then I moved it into my Win98 system. With DriveImage2002 I made an image of another drive, which consists of about 42 files of 2GB size. I copied that repetitively to the 500GB drive until 95% was full. Up to this WinME ScanDskW and Defragment worked fine. Of course there was nothing to do for Defrag. I let DriveImage check some of the copied files. Then I started some work on the big drive, generating some smaller files and moving a few GB around. After that ScanDskW showed the out-of-memory message. Defragment still worked. When it finished, ScanDskW still showed out-of-memory, but after a reboot it worked (no surface test). At this point there were 1,253,082 clusters free. Then I unpacked an about 2GB RAR archive, after that ScanDskW showed again the out-of-memory message, after reboot it worked. As far as I remember in the FAT there are 4 bytes per cluster. When ScanDskW has to held 2 FATs in memory it needs about 240MB. This could be the origin of the limitation. I use a standard Win98SE modified with Maximus decims BHDD3.0, but instead of the English I use the localized German (ME) versions. I have 512MB memory. bye Wolfgang EDIT: I did some further testing: upgraded memory to 786,432 kiB and added MaxFileCache=356352 to system.ini according to the recommendation of Igor Leyko, but this didn't change anything. I can run ScanDskW only after a fresh reboot, otherwise the out-of-memory message shows up.

Hello, I plan to copy a hd (about 100GB), there is mixed stuff on it, but its not the system partition. I know Win98SE explorer has some problems with large number of files, but can I really loose data? Or is it better to put the 2 hd's via USB on a XP system? Or any other suggestion? bye Wolfgang

Hi Multibooter, thanks for the long replay. I'm collecting maps, for this even a TB drive is too small. The collection grows. If its necessary to have 2 partitions, then I would buy a smaller drive first and a second drive later. I dont like 2 partitions on a data drive, since reorganizing the data involves lots of copying and needs free space. I did the 48-bit upgrade and use the WinME utilities. Although I don't know whats their limit. I didnt think about how to partition and format the drive. fdisk has a 512MB limit, but the XP people have the same problem. PATA is outdated. The dealer here has mostly SATA drives. SATA has some important advantages and I have the WD Green in mind which is unfortunately not available as PATA. The JM20337 is an USB to IDE or SATA bridge, this allows me to use new SATA and my old IDE drives in it. I went through the ebay offers and found not yet another chipset than the JM20337. The JM20338 is a SATA or USB to IDE bridge, which is simply another thing. Do you use a SATA HD on it? According to the specs this is not possible. bye Wolfgang

Hello, on ebay there are lots of cheap USB HDD cases offered. See for example here It is said that Win98 is supported, there is a driver CD. Some say that the chipset JM20337 is inside, others say that the speed is limited to 60MB/s due to the chipset. One should be able to put in any IDE or SATA HD no matter what disk size. (Yes, I have read the complete 48bit discussion and know about the 32bit limit) I need a disk drive which fits on both my Win98SE desktop and the XP Laptop. It should have one partition as large as possible. Does anybody run a 1TB HDD in such a case? Do you think it can be true what the sellers say? Of course I'll first try a smaller HD. bye Wolfgang