rloew

I took a different approach to this problem. I Patched the Disk Driver so that 48-Bit LBA was enabled regardless of the Registry setting. This allowed me to Install and run 2000 SP4 from the high end of a 1TiB Hard Drive.

The standard MBR is limited to 32-Bits so the maximum entry is 4Gi Sectors. The "stretched" MBR would allow one Partition to use another 4Gi Sectors. I have developed an extended MBR that supports 40-Bit LBA or 64Gi Sectors. All IDE Hard drives I know of only use 512 Byte Sectors so this limit becomes 2TiB. USB Hard Drive Controllers may or may not use 4KiB Sectors. I have seen Drives larger than 2TiB use 4KiB and others not. Same with Drives smaller than 2TiB. 4KiB Sectors allow 16TiB with MBR. Neither unmodified 9x, 2000, nor XP support more than 32 Bits so the "Stretched" MBR approach will not work. I have been looking into modifying XP in the same way I modified 9x to see if I can break this barrier.

To find the VID and PID of an Unknown USB Device, run REGEDIT. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ENUM\USB. You will see a list of VID and PID numbered Keys. Open each one and click on each Subkey. Disregard VID_0000. Look at the DeviceDesc Value String. If it says "Unknown" then you have found a Device with no Driver. If you find multiple ones, you may want to go into Safe Mode and remove all Unknown USB Devices and then start again.

You will need to get the VID and PID for the Device from the Registry. I have been doing some experimenting with a couple of different USB to LAN Adapters. I have observed a possible bug in the system software for both 98SE and ME where crashes occur sporatically. I have seen them on different Computers with different vendors USB-LAN Drivers.

If you are using an unmodified Windows 98SE Installation CD, this would suggest a problem with HIMEM.SYS. HIMEM.SYS or an equivalent is required for Windows 9x. I see several issues with this Motherboard that you will have to address. 1. RAM larger than 768MB. 2. Hard Disk larger than 137GB. 3. Legacy Mode SATA not available. 4. No Drivers for Video, Audio or LAN. 5. No PCI slots, limiting you to PCI-E addons. 6. ACPI probably incompatable. I have Patches for the first three. These can be applied between the first and second passes during Install. You may want to consider a different Video Card. You can use an USB Audio Adapter for sound. There is a buggy Driver that might work for the LAN. My experiments suggest that there might be a problem using USB LAN Adapters. ACPI can be disabled by manually starting Setup.

I may have to take back what I said in #1. You may need a 4320p monitor.

Hardware IDs do not change because of Operating System. A few multi-mode devices will change ID if they are reconfigured. This is usually done in the BIOS or by a driver that recognizes the Device in either mode. In the latter case, Windows will only see the default setting. To use the alternate ID would require a configuration program to be run from AUTOEXEC.BAT. I have done this to switch off AHCI Mode before running Windows.

I have developed a version of FILE64 for XP. It lets me transparently handle Files larger than 4GiB on sections of FAT32 Partitions. These can be shared with Windows 9x with FILE64 installed. It can also be used to create a section of a NTFS Partitions using the same format. Either type of section can be shared over a network between any combination of XP and 9x. I also developed some tools that work in both 9x and XP to facilitate extending System DLLs. Dibya is using some of them for his KERNEL32 extensions.

I use: Windows 98SE with my Patches for general use and development. Windows XP SP3 with my Patches for browsing. Windows 10 for the few websites that are not supported otherwise and experimenting. Windows 95, ME, 7, 8, and Linux for experimenting.

Assuming you set RAM Memory to exactly 1GiB using MaxPhysPage=40000. 1GiB = 1048576KiB. MaxFileCache is in KiB so the minimum is 1048576/24 = 43691. I rounded up to 44000. If you try to set MaxFileCache to less than the minimum, then Windows will simply ignore the setting and stick with it's internal value which can be as high as 8192000 or 800MiB. I never looked at MinFileCache. It didn't seem important. I haven't experimented with Main Partitions being larger than 32GB so I don't know anything about cache issues relating to it.

MaxFileCache must be set to at least 44000 NOT 4300 with 1GiB of RAM. It can be set much higher if you want more Disk Cache. Going above 524288 is risky. MinFileCache is not important.

I said the corruption I saw was with Windows 10 NOT Windows 95. Incidentally I tried the Demo of the Diskeeper Defragmenter years ago. It consistently corrupted a Partition larger than approximately 200GB.

As far as I can tell, Windows 95B and 95C can support Partitions up to 1TiB without Patches. A Patch is needed for the 137GB Physical Hard Drive Limit. So far I have only had corruption on large FAT32 Partitions with Windows 10. Windows 7 and Windows 8 may be at risk but I have not tested them.

The BIOS maps PCI, AGP, and PCI-E Configuration and Devices to Memory Mapped I/O Space. Normally these are mapped downward from the APIC and BIOS area at the top. Due to PCI alignment restrictions there are often fairly substantial gaps in these allocations. This area is not available for System RAM. Most, not all, Motherboards can remap the Physical RAM, that would otherwise be useless, up into the 64-Bit Address Space so that it can be used by 64-Bit Software. For example, if you have 8GiB of RAM and 1GiB of Memory Mapped I/O Space, the RAM would be mapped as follows: 0-3GiB -> 0-3GiB (32-Bit Space) 4-8GiB -> 4-8GiB (64-Bit Space) 3-4GiB -> 8-9GiB (64-Bit Space) or 0-3GiB -> 0-3GiB (32-Bit Space) 3-8GiB -> 4-9GiB (64-Bit Space) depending on architecture. Large Video Cards can put a serious dent in the available 32-Bit RAM. Having PCI-E also takes up a large block for it's Extended Configuration Table.

No program that needs 4GiB of RAM can possibly run entirely in 32-Bit Mode so it would have to be a 64-Bit Program or use 64-Bit extensions. Windows 9x will display the available 32-Bit RAM. This can vary from 2.5GiB to 3.7GiB depending upon Motherboard and Add-on Cards. The remainder of your 8GiB is mapped to the 64-Bit RAM space.

You are right. Wrong LAN Adapter. The correct one is the Inland UED011 USB to LAN Adapter.

Safe Mode runs only the bare minimum of Drivers. USB is not one of them. USB Keyboards can be used if the BIOS provides Legacy USB Keyboard support but this is mapped to the PS/2 Interface. USB Drives may also be supported through Legacy Mode.

My RAM Limitation Patch will let you run 9x without any memory limitation. You will be able to use the roughly 3GB of 32-Bit RAM available in most Systems. The remainder will require my 64-Bit RAMDISK and/or Programs written using my 64-Bit Memory API.

I rarely shop online. The Adapters I mentioned are still available in stores such as Micro Center. The USB LAN Adapter is the Tenda TEL9901G. The USB Sound Adapter is the Kingwin USB-3DSA.

I'm looking for a PCI card that can handle 300Mbps and has Win98SE drivers. The oldest card I could find has ME drivers but not 98. I thought it would still work with 98 but no. You didn't specify the Model Number of the card you found. Was the problem in the Driver or in the Client Application? I have a Driver that provides all of the WinME API missing in 98SE.

There are both USB Lan and USB Audio Adapters. I stocked up on both.

If you don't see the Logo and/or DOS Screen, then the problem is elsewhere. None of the problems I have identified would stop you from reaching Safe-Mode Windows.

In addition to the PCI size issue with 512MB nVidia Cards that my Patch resolves. There are two other issues that may affect smaller cards with some Motherboards. A Resource mapping problem can cause a crash during Boot. The other causes the Mouse to nearly freeze and may cause a Disk Error BSOD. @ruthan I would need to know specifically what happened when you tried to use the 7600.

If you are running on 9x, no other core would be active. My post refers to 9x. If you are running on XP or later, multiple cores would reduce system overhead, improving performance.

The number of CPUs has no effect on performance or compatability with old games. Any improvement is due to architectural improvements in modern Processors such as Cache or reduced Instruction execution time.