rloew

That's not good! Any chance of a community patch? We could call it rloew's FDISK Patch. Due to more fundamental limitations, particularly the inability to define a Partition without erasing it, I created my own Partitioning tool called RFDISK. It provides many more features than FDISK including the setup of a Dual-Boot or Multi-Boot system. It is also not limited to 512GiB. It can easily handle 2TiB. An experimental version should support 512TiB.

Generally that would be true but there are exceptions. Sometimes there is no choice as to which FAT type you can use. I used a 4GiB FAT-16 formatted CF card in my camera which does not recognize FAT-32. Crashing is unlikely as the biggest problem seems to be Programs treating the Partition as having zero size. Windows NT supported 4GiB FAT-16 Partitions. Only >4GiB FAT-16 Partitions require Patches. rloew, sorry to hear about AOL retiring hometown - looks like AOL have made a lot of people unhappy... I've been using the updated FDISK for years - care to expand on what's buggy in it? The upgraded FDISK was not adequately debugged. If you use it to create a small Partition in the first 8GiB, it may produce a corrupt entry if an odd number of cylinders are assigned to the partition.

During Windows Installation, the WININIT command is used to merge and compress the core set of VXD files into VMM32.VXD. This is done immediately after the first Reboot. The RAM Limitation Patch is designed to work with the already merged VMM32.VXD file. It will work with the unmerged VXD files but it will be unable to uninstall or update them after Windows has merged them. If you are planning to install 98SESP later, you will need to run WININIT before you install the RAM Limitation Patch. I would recommend the following procedure when installing 98SESP. 1. Complete initial Windows Installation with my Patch Installed if not already done. 2. Boot Windows. 3. Uninstall the RAM Limitation Patch. 4. Install 98SESP but do not reboot, if asked. 5. Reinstall the RAM Limitation Patch. 6. Reboot Computer. If you are forced to reboot between steps 3 and 5 do the following: 1. Boot from a DOS floppy. 2. Reinstall the RAM Limitation Patch. 3. Boot Windows. 4. Uninstall the RAM Limitation Patch if the 98SESP Installation has not been completed. 5. Continue from where you left off making sure you Reinstall the RAM Limitation Patch before shutting down. The Exuberant website says that the 98SESP Patch fixes the 512MB Limitation. This means that it probably sets MAXPHYSPAGE to limit total RAM as well as the MAXFILECACHE setting. After you install their Patch, you should remove both lines from your SYSTEM.INI file. This should give you full access to your 2GB of RAM. EDIT: Confirmed! 98SESP Patch SPUPDATE.INF sets MAXPHYSPAGE and MAXFILECACHE

I have a Patch for Windows ME and 98SE to support SATA Drivers. http://rloew1.no-ip.com

Now that's just showing off! Not until I figure out how to use all the cores in the Triple Core in Windows 9X.

I recently developed a Patch for Windows 98, 98SE and ME that provides support for Integrated Motherboard SATA Controllers. This should resolve the slow reading and writing on your SATA Hard Drive. You can find details on my website: http://rloew1.no-ip.com

SPLIT8MB fragments available Low RAM so that Windows will not put large blocks of data in Low RAM during Real Mode Boot. The /M option on the Windows 98/SE/ME RAM Limitation Patch was intended to replace SPLIT8MB but it appears that some people need SPLIT8MB. Version 6.0 of my RAM Limitation Patch makes the same Patches as Version 5.1 for Windows 98SE when not using the /M option. My other machines have not been updated except for my older GigaByte K8NNXP (RLoew #2) which needed the /M option when I reenabled the RTL8110 Ethernet.

Thanks Rudolph. I'll probably leave the SPLIT8MB file on the system and just REM out the line in autoexec.bat rather than remove it. Then I can easily re-enable it if any problems do appear. You do say that new programs can sometimes over-write your patched files and cause problems to come back, and that will be "belt and braces" should that ever happen! Cheers, Dave. Fortunately, unlike my High Capacity Disk Patch, if the Patch is overwritten, your Computer will not boot but no damage will occur. You can reinstall the Patch from DOS. In an earlier post, you mentioned getting a blank screen when your Registry was within a certain range. I observed similar behavior. There is a narrow range where VFAT initializes properly but the boot does not complete. On occasion I have seen crashes on the VXDs that follow such as VPICD. This has been reported by others in other forums. I suspect that VFAT crashes are the most common symptom because it probably is the first to reserve DMA buffers.

I think only part of the Registry is actually loaded during Boot, so the amount of RAM and the use of Gigabit Ethernet seem to be be much more important.

I wrote SPLIT8MB first, then reworked my Patch. Either works alone on my Computer. I included SPLIT8MB in case the Patch wasn't sufficient. If it is not needed, you can disable SPLIT8MB as it will use up a small amount of RAM.

My Registry never got so big that it caused a problem. Like the Ethernet Driver, the Registry is also placed in Low RAM limiting available DMA space. It would explain why I noticed that the maximum RAM I could use decreased after every update I did to my machine. With everything loaded I could not run even with 1GB of RAM. I didn't think the SPLIT8MB.EXE Program was needed after I added the "Move VXD" Option to my RAM Limitation Patch but with a 14MB Registry you probably need it as well.

Tnere is more involved in making SATA work than the ESDI_506 Driver Registry settings.

AOL terminated their web hosting service so I had to move my website to http://rloew1.no-ip.com. Windows ME SCANDISK and DEFRAG can be used in Windows 98 and have a limit of 1TiB. There is a bug in the Windows 98, SE and ME FileSystems that under some conditions limits a Partition to 1TiB. The standard FDISK can be used in Percentage mode up to 512GiB. I haven't tested the updated version since it is buggy. I have a Partitioning Program that can handle 2TiB. Some Chipset based SATA controllers are recognized by Windows 9X as IDE drives. Windows 9X can support these SATA Controllers but a modified .INF file is required for proper operation. FAT16 partitions up to 4 GiB are supported but some programs will not work properly. With Patches, a FAT16 partition can be uo to 8GiB.

I was unable to match your handle to anyone on my Customer List. All purchasers of Version 3.2 were notified of an update to Version 5.0 in April. Version 5.0 will work with International Versions of Window 9X. If you are using the Demo of Version 3.2, it should only work in Safe Mode, it was designed not to work in Normal Mode. The Patch will work with 3GB but there are more Programs that have problems when you exceed 2GB. If you still have problems with Version 5.0, contact me for further assistance. Rudolph R. Loew