Reinstalling win 98 SE

[pygmollion]

I am bewildered at the amount of reading I've done in the last 4-5 days researching the installation issue that I have trying to reinstall Win98SE onto an old Dell C840 laptop that I have. Old HDD died (20 GB) and I got a good deal on a 160 GB hdd... Now the issue is that the bios doesn't see past 137 GB. And of course so does the win98se install cd. The windows XP cd that I used to at least set up the partitions see the whole 160 gb. I've tried using the Autopatcher98 which is great and solved a lot of other problems. I also tried to make my own unattended install using the W9X package thing.. and that didn't work... It came out saying it couldn't find command.com ... twice and would hang.

Just one question... How do I slipstream at LEAST the 48b LBA update so that the install CD sees and uses the entire 160 gb as I see fit??

I forgot... Friday is a bad day to post for help lol

Edited October 6, 2007 by pygmollion

[Sfor]

If the BIOS does not detect the whole HDD capacity, the solution is to:

- create a smaller partition,

- install the windows 98

- if the motherboard is made on an Intel Chipset install the Intel Application Accelerator. It provides the LBA 48 support, even if the BIOS does not support LBA 48. If not, than some other LBA 48 patch could be necesary.

- now it could be possible to increase the partition size to be 160 GB, but I would recomend to create a second partition, leaving the first one to be not greater than LBA 48 limit.

[Mijzelf]

- now it could be possible to increase the partition size to be 160 GB

While this is possible, it's not a good idea. The first stage in the booting process W9x is dependent to the BIOS. So if only one file which is needed in this stage is placed above the 128GiB limit, the system won't boot anymore. This situation could be achieved by a simple defragmentation.

[pygmollion]

Thanks Sfor and Mijzelf. I've got it set up on a 10 gb partition so far.. and formatted the rest of the 138 gb as a second drive. I also DID try to install the Intel Application Accelerator... strange.. it won't install saying I do not meet the required minimums.. I do have the Intel Chipset drivers bla bla bla...and it does list win98 as supported... what gives?? grrrrrr... and the dell is on a 845 chipset... and the processor is a 1.8 ghz p4........lol I'm tired. Playing games on on the slower 30gb hdd is pretty awesome... got half life up and running and a few other games... I just wanted to use the 160 gb with the fat a** 8 mb cache lol. thanks guys.

[Sfor]

I'm using IAA 2.3.0.2160 with Intel 845 chipset, as well.

However more important is the IDE controller chip. According to the readme IEE requires Intel 82801AA, 82801AB, 82801BA or 82801DB controllers.