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Install w98 on Large Drives (Above the 137Gb Barrier)


Fredledingue

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Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but does the unpatched Win98 FDISK does not only have a cosmetic defect, but that incorrect figure it displays also limits your operations? For example, I tried to FDISK a 80GB drive, but it showed my drive @ 100% to only have much less than the correct 76317MB capacity (Which is displayed in the patched FDISK), and does not allow me to partition my disk beyond that.

I DO know that the cosmetic defect in format.com does not affect it's function...

Short answer: Yes!

Long answer: read Q263044, Petr's thread on Format and Fdisk, and Q280737, in this order.

My opinion: Best to use GDISK (not for free) or the Ranish Partition Manager (wonderful, free, does not like SATA).

Edited by dencorso
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  • 7 months later...

Most of the files inside BHDD31.ZIP are from ME. For ME, all you need is this fix: ME48BLBA.EXE. Now, the pointer I've given you is for the English version of the file, which probably works also with the chinese versions. Check the properties of your present C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR: I suspect it already is an English language file. And even if it's not, the English file should work. Do back up first. Then try to apply this patch. If the patcher fails for any reason, restore your back-up and I'll help you install the patched ESDI_506.PDR from true DOS. But be sure to do it now, before you add a BIG HDD. Good luck!

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Most of the files inside bighdd are from ME. For ME, all you need is this fix: ME48BLBA.EXE. Now, the pointer I've given you is for the English version of the file, which probably works also with the chinese versions. Check the properties of your present C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR: I suspect it already is an English language file. And even if it's not, the English file should work. Do back up first. Then try to apply this patch. If the patcher fails for any reason, restore your back-up and I'll help you install the patched ESDI_506.PDR from true DOS. But be sure to do it now, before you add a BIG HDD. Good luck!

Thanks for replying.do you mean that i don't need bhh patch for winme,just need the lba patch?

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  • 7 years later...
On Monday, February 25, 2008 at 5:54 AM, galahs said:

In general on Win98 you want to keep your partitions at or under 120GB

I personally use a Windows Me bootdisk to do my formatting and partitioning as it supports larger drives.

I also concur 128GB or 120GB Max capacity.

Nice to know the ME FDISK fixed some issues.  I'll need to get a hold of that for testing.

98SE FDISK v2 fixed over 64GB.

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I broke that limit over 13 years ago. You knew that already.

FDISK can be used up to 512GB per Partition using percentages.
My RFDISK can easily create up to 2TiB Partitions.

Edited by rloew
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On Tuesday, June 20, 2017 at 10:51 AM, rloew said:

I broke that limit over 13 years ago. You knew that already.

FDISK can be used up to 512GB per Partition using percentages.
My RFDISK can easily create up to 2TiB Partitions.

The 128GB limit isn't a deal breaker for DOS and 9X/ME and using FDISK for about 34 years you learn how to use it properly despite any limitations created over time.  The percentages input aren't accurate as specifying the exact MB in FDISK.  I actually spent the time to calculate all FDISK partition sizes from the smallest to the largest and ran through test after test and I also observed XP Windows Disk Management sizes reported after creating the partition in DOS and did the reverse in XP and there were differences.

There are a couple numbers you can enter and it will kick FDISK back to the Main Menu which is a strange bug I discovered.

The largest you can do is 99999 or 100GB with manual entry on FDISK v2.  However I don't recommend using that partition size.  One of the biggest problems is the verifying drive integrity when you create a new partition it has to check it first which takes a long time.  I still wouldn't recommend using a drive over 128GB for simplification and no need to software patch everything.

Is your software patch to the FAT per drive only meaning each individual hard drive in the system needs to be patched?  Is this a DOS patch or overall software patch that works on any OS?  If you were to destroy all the partitions and then use FDISK to create a new partition and make a bootable DOS drive I assume your patch is gone again and it would need to be reapplied?  And assuming it's some FAT patch per drive I would still have to remember which drives I have patched or didn't or is there a way to do a check it was patched in DOS or Windows?

Using a 120GB/128GB drive hardware solution really is the best method for the Primary drive.  I just don't have to think about corruption ever happening.  Even a 160GB could be used safely to work if you FDisk up to 128GB and don't include the rest of the capacity in the Extended partition to prevent accidentally allocating it as partition space.  A quick and dirty way to do this is 2GB FAT16 Primary Partition, then for the Extended Partition just enter 99999.  This will cut it to about 102GB but fastest way to avoid the corruption issue.  You could use the % to calculate close to 126GB but not go over.  I think 78% might be the right value to input for the Extended Partition.

If you need really large capacity hard drives > 200GB I would use them externally via USB instead although I haven't tested the 9X/ME USB storage size limits I would think it should probably be the same as XP at 2TB.  I kind of doubt anyone in 9X/ME is going to need over 128GB for most of their OS storage needs so any extra storage can be done via USB external drives.  The All Options selected Full size 98SE install is around 400MB on a recent test.

It's better to use the FAT16 2GB for the Primary Boot Partition.  It retains the backward compatibility for older DOS programs which don't like FAT32 partitions.  The other partitions can be FAT16 limited to 2GB or bigger >2GB with FAT32.  Any picky programs you can copy from the FAT32 partition to the FAT16 bootable partition to run in DOS without problems.  If the C: gets corrupted I'll use a bootable 98SE floppy disk to access the hard drive and I just restore the OS boot image off the other partition and takes but a second.

The Extended Partition can be the remaining capacity of the 128GB drive -2GB.  Then you can build the first logical drive at 64GB if you want the largest compatible partition but you must format it in DOS only if you want to use for storing OS images.  The remaining partitions can be 32GB, 16GB, 8GB, or 4GB as needed till the drive capacity is used up.  32GB max works good too in case you need to reformat in Windows XP instead of DOS since XP restricts to 32GB partitions without 3rd party software.  The max you would usually need in 98SE being used a common daily OS would be 16GB max from my experience.  I tried living on 8GB in XP and eventually ran out of space.  32GB would be plenty for 9X for many years.  Also redirecting your Programs Folder to a 3rd Partition would be a good way to reduce the entire OS size from being combined with all your programs which will making your OS images bloated.

.

For the most simplest Partitioning of the 120GB/128GB and fool proof.

9X/ME/2K/XP MultiBoot Partition Breakdown:

FDISK MB sizes (2047 Primary, Extended / Logical Drives 32765, 32765, 32765, left over space)

.

C: 2GB FAT16 - DOS, 9X/ME - simplest setup

D: 32GB FAT32 - 2K can be 9X/ME/2K if space is required

E: 32GB FAT32 - XP

F: 32GB FAT32 - Program Files and My Documents location.

G: 22GB-30GB Remaining capacity can be partitioned off as one partition used for storing OS boot partition image or OS image.

.

Edited by 98SE
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You are way behind the times.
It doesn't take many HD Videos to fill up a 120GB Hard Drive.
I don't even see any new Hard Drives that small in the stores anymore.
I have already broken the 2TiB limit. My 4TB Hard Drive is nearly full.
My C:\ Partition uses 4GB out of 8GB and has no data stored in it.

The Patch is for Windows 9x, not the Drive.
I also have a DDO for old BIOSes.

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I asked you to PM your info to confirm you were a customer. If you were not on MSFN that only explains why you didn't tell me then.

You must like to operate a very limited system if you only use 512MB of RAM and apparently don't want to use Hard Disks larger than 137GB.

Without the Patch to support CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, you cannot use the RAMDisks in Windows ME.

The RAMDisk can be reformatted and raw copied to.

I sell the 32-Bit RAMDisk and the 64-Bit RAMDisk individually so Customers can use either or both.
The Dual-Mode RAMDisk is new and is not even available yet. I plan to include it as a free upgrade to purchasers who own both single mode RAMDisks. No customer get "screwed".

I mentioned PSE to indicate that none of the RAMDisks will work on CPUs that are too old to support PSE. They all depend upon HIMEMEX.

You still haven't explained why you would need to deallocate or reallocate RAMDisks dynamically.
Your suggestion about resetting the 64-Bit Memory space is only the easy part. You still have to remove all of the Drive Letters from the System Tables. The Memory used by the TSRs cannot be recovered so you would keep losing Conventional Memory.

2K is the smallest possible FAT FileSystem. As you are aware, I chose a granularity of 1KiB for the RAMDisk size.
You could reformat the RAMDisk with an odd number of Sectors if you wish.

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21 hours ago, rloew said:

You are way behind the times.
It doesn't take many HD Videos to fill up a 120GB Hard Drive.
I don't even see any new Hard Drives that small in the stores anymore.
I have already broken the 2TiB limit. My 4TB Hard Drive is nearly full.
My C:\ Partition uses 4GB out of 8GB and has no data stored in it.

The Patch is for Windows 9x, not the Drive.
I also have a DDO for old BIOSes.

Don't take this negatively, but I respect your work and please don't retire so if people want to use your patch and I'm assuming it is free then they should if they aren't too concerned with full backward compatibility.  But from a hardware perspective I've kept at this for nearly four decades just to make sure what works or doesn't as far as compatibility all the way to the Z270.

Testing 98SE on a Z77 spare system with 1GB now.  But 512MB would have avoided the BSOD error on the first install.  And I want to test out all Ramdrives and yours possibly later if it can be perfected further I would definitely recommend it.

As for my main system it is a Z77 32GB and via USB I have 8TB external hard drives hooked up with no issues and I would go to 16TB or 17.6TB max if they were available.  If I were to add secondary laptop hard drives/SSD internally I would use 2TB max which is plenty of space.  I do record 8 channels of HDTV simultaneously with no issues all via USB externally.  You just have to make sure the Allocation Unit Sizes are 64KB to sustain and reduce the amount of allocation units.  I had done testing with 512 bytes AUS and it can be overwhelmed easily around 3 or 4 HD channels on just USB 2.0 on XP and my method has no issues hardware or software based.

As for the Z77 spare for 98SE only test subject I will be putting up a topic on that momentarily.  I am resurrecting it now.  It was put on hold for many many years due to being busy and the recent nostalgic urge kicked in to get 98SE and DOS back for recording video/audio footage is now possible with large capacity hard drives.

The 120GB and 128GB capacities are easily found on eBay or Amazon.  I prefer 2.5" laptop hard drives or SSDs.  I would not recommend those 3.5" IDE or SATA if that's what you were thinking.  The ones I prefer aren't impossible to find if you look.  The SSD variety are the easiest to find and quite cheap around $30-$60 range and the best pick for today's modern Windows 98 installation using physical hardware without patching.  You can even go lower as the Boot Partition and 98SE can easily fit on a 4TB SSD if you want to go super cheap.  Then add a secondary 2TB hard drive for internal storage which in your case your patch would be useful here.  However if you moving any files or deleting or copying in DOS there could be a chance of corruption.  The limits of DOS even through USB I have noticed as well although I'm pretty sure 120GB/128GB there should be no corruption.

I wouldn't risk 4TB on my DOS/MultiOS Windows boot partition.  2TB would be the max I would consider testing but I prefer using those 2TB as external USB powered hard drives and very convenient to move from 98SE to XP to W7 to W10 without any compatibility issues nor patching.

The problem is the patch is for 9X and not DOS.  But true DOS programs assuming your patch works on FAT32 but not FAT16 partitions would cause an issue.  I've been doing this constantly over the years or decades just to maintain backward compatibility as long as possible.  Windows XP non service pack would also have issues if say your patch was 9X specific.  The SATA 120GB/128GB 2.5" laptop hard drives or SSDs are my goto for primary hard drive choice even in my other modern setups.  So far not one single problem when moving the hard drive around to another computer.  I just use the bare bones USB to SATA adapter if I need to move data onto the drive say on XP or other OS on the fly.

But the DDO you mentioned I did use back in the day from hard disk manufacturers when earlier IDE hard drives could not be fully utilized due to the older BIOS limitations.  I think the earliest hard drive limitation was the 504MB one.  But the most recent limitation that keeps legacy support on DOS/9X/ME/NT/2K/XP was the 128GB one.  Even though 2K and XP had actual SPs to fix this capacity limit I on occasion test out vanilla OS for legacy support differences without having to worry if this hard drive was patched or not.

Also I still don't recommend the first partition or your C: to be that large.  Even the 2GB FAT16 MBR can store the DOS/9X/ME/2K/XP/Vista/W7 bootloader.  It is around 22MB in size.  I hardly combine the OS onto the same partition with the exception of DOS/9X/ME.  It seems to favor the C: drive in multiple 98 partition installation tests especially when you are dealing with installing or removing internal hard drives it shifts the drive letters around so Primary Partition C: on the first drive is the best 9X/ME to install onto.  2K and XP on the other hand you could install multiple copies of each OS on as many partitions and still be differentiated on the boot loader menu.  One significant advantage that it had over 9X/ME.  If I really needed the space and didn't care about DOS compatibility I would prefer 8GB to 32GB FAT32 C: partition.  But I always install my Program Files and redirect My Documents folder to a separate partition away from my OS to keep it lean for OS imaging.

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Quote

    You must like to operate a very limited system if you only use 512MB of RAM and apparently don't want to use Hard Disks larger than 137GB.

Anyhow I'm working on that now by trying a 3rd party USB card to see if the onboard USB ports were just not friendly with 98SE.  That was one reason I had stopped playing around on the 98SE Z77.  However the serial mouse worked fine on it via COM Port 1.

Again this 98SE test was on a Z77 spare system not my main system so this memory is for compatibility.  I wanted to have a completely fanless Windows 98SE system running on modern hardware.  The P4 seems to require better cooling so I'm putting that one on hold for now.  One reason I originally stopped using the P4 was the loud fan noise from the CPU, Power Supply, and IDE 3.5" hard drives and it was getting too slow over time running off one core.

As for large capacity drives over 137GB or 128GB actual I do use hard drives on other systems up to 8TB or 17.6TB when they become available in a few years.  Once I establish 98SE functionality on the modern system I will try tweaking it to see how much more RAM can be installed although I'm "aware" of your patch as I purchased it as a backup plan I wanted to see what other possibilities exist as well in my upcoming compatibility tests.  But as we have both discussed even your Limitation Patch has limits for 98SE in the lower 1GB range.  Only WinME has the higher threshold of almost 2GB.  The biggest question is how the 512MB vs Patched Limit affects programs in combination with various video and sound cards.  This will part of my Z77 98SE compatibility testing process.

Quote

     Without the Patch to support CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, you cannot use the RAMDisks in Windows ME.

Which Patch are you referring to here?  I know there was a Patch to restore the Pure DOS functionality in Win ME.

Quote

    The RAMDisk can be reformatted and raw copied to.

    I sell the 32-Bit RAMDisk and the 64-Bit RAMDisk individually so Customers can use either or both.
    The Dual-Mode RAMDisk is new and is not even available yet. I plan to include it as a free upgrade to purchasers who own both single mode RAMDisks. No customer get "screwed".

Thanks for keeping good customer ethics.  I hope to see the newly Dual Mode Ramdisk available as the single replacement phasing out the 32-Bit and 64-Bit individual version.  Or even better to just include all three in case someone wishes to any of the three on various test systems.  I myself would prefer testing and using all three versions in different scenarios as I have a multitude of computers dating back to the late 70s so I would be able to check compatibility and narrow it down.

Quote

    I mentioned PSE to indicate that none of the RAMDisks will work on CPUs that are too old to support PSE. They all depend upon HIMEMEX.

I wanted to confirm this was what you are referring to regarding PSE?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSE-36

PSE-36 (36-bit Page Size Extension) refers to a feature of x86 processors that extends the physical memory addressing capabilities from 32 bits to 36 bits, allowing addressing to up to 64 GB of memory.

Digging further I think I found a link to possibly where the first CPU for Intel could support PSE-36.

https://books.google.com/books?id=MLJClvCYh34C&pg=PA439#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Pentium 1.  This may indicate your DOS Ramdisk program might not function on 486 or earlier systems?  I have no idea what older systems you have on the Intel side as you stated you only had AMD systems plus the Z87 Intel one.  Since you own primarily AMD systems where is the the cut off point on AMD CPUs where the program compatibility breaks for your DOS Ramdisk?

Quote

I mentioned PSE to indicate that none of the RAMDisks will work on CPUs that are too old to support PSE. They all depend upon HIMEMEX.

If you did create a legacy DOS Ramdisk that didn't require PSE-36 support what is the maximum Ramdisk size that could be achieved?

Also assuming if the PSE limitation is due to your HIMEMEX could an alternate Memory Manager like JEMM be used in conjunction with a DOS Ramdisk program written by you to achieve a higher capacity Ramdisk size or would it still require you to write a superior NON PSE CPU DOS Memory Manager and its own DOS Ramdisk to use it making a fourth variant?

Quote

You still haven't explained why you would need to deallocate or reallocate RAMDisks dynamically.
    Your suggestion about resetting the 64-Bit Memory space is only the easy part. You still have to remove all of the Drive Letters from the System Tables. The Memory used by the TSRs cannot be recovered so you would keep losing Conventional Memory.

Since it can't be removed then I suggest leaving those drive letters that were created in the System Tables.  When you recreate new Ramdrives you can reuse those letters again as they will only designate or point to the newly created Ramdrive starting from the 4GB start region.  Even in DOS for FDISK a deleted partition letter will still remain until you reboot so I guess this would follow common system behavior.  So if it can't be undone and the drive letter can still be reserved to be reassigned to a new Ramdrive without rebooting then this is still preferable.

My reasons for the de/reallocating is still a theoretical benchmark test I'm pondering and working on making concrete and without actually testing the program in front of me to it refine it is hard to put into words as it is still in flux.  It would probably test the limits of your Ramdisk and make it superior to just a simple Ramdrive.  Think of Michelangelo Simoni staring at a block of marble except you have the chisel and I'm coming up with figures for you to create.  But for something more concrete there are some DOS related uses such as DESQview/X and using multiple virtual floppy images.  This was one the last multitasking DOS programs before Windows 3.1 and 9X/ME killed it.  But it was purest form of a Multitasking DOS at the time.  I believe you said your Ramdisks could be formatted in DOS as real disks once the driver letter is created.

Quote

    2K is the smallest possible FAT FileSystem. As you are aware, I chose a granularity of 1KiB for the RAMDisk size.
    You could reformat the RAMDisk with an odd number of Sectors if you wish.

If 2K is the smallest FAT16 you could create maybe your Ramdrive could support Floppy emulation.  There was also FAT12 for Floppy disks.  Emulation of 160KB to 2.88MB Floppy disks should be possible with the Ramdrive.  Emulating a LS-120 and LS-240 might be useful for 9X/ME to run in the Ramdrive on modern systems.  It might be a way to get around the Z170 AHCI issue.

https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/fs/fat/fat-1.html

Disk Type   Partition Size   FAT Type   Sectors   Typical
Cluster Size

Floppy Disks   360K   12-bit   2   1K

Floppy Disks   720K   12-bit   2   1K

Floppy Disks   1.2 MB   12-bit   1   512 bytes

Floppy Disks   1.44 MB   12-bit   1   512 bytes

Floppy Disks   2.88 MB   12-bit   2   1K

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk

There were some 8 inch floppy disks for CP/M.  I got a few of these still sealed in box.  You could do CP/M emulation without needing the floppy hardware using the Ramdrive.

These are just a few ideas and I don't see the need to overwhelm you with all of them if it is beyond your skillset then it would be pointless since they wouldn't see fruition.  But if some of these were done there would be more coming.

Quote

I asked you to PM your info to confirm you were a customer. If you were not on MSFN that only explains why you didn't tell me then.

I wouldn't see the need to PM any of that kind of personal information in order to prove I was a customer but if I were getting your source code for your programs to maintain from perishing or obsolescence or something of that nature to continue its legacy for future systems would I go that far and get to know you on such a personal level and share such information.  I explained my MSFN joining history on the other thread.  I don't see any reason why a customer has to prove there were a customer out of the blue.  To be frank my original signing up for a MSFN account purpose had to do with Windows 2000 and a user named BlackWingCat and nothing to do with your program.  I just liked 98SE and the username wasn't taken at the time although other variants were that I wanted.  Your software I stumbled upon on other sites through google over the years described as a way to solve 98SE with too much memory and I did have other thoughts before buying was is the website legit, is this program trustworthy, does it work, et cetera but I felt good enough to purchase it as a backup plan in case my 98SE on Z77 plan using 512MB DDR3 failed.  Although I did install 98SE successfully using physical DDR3 memory without needing any patching the USB mouse still had issues so I stopped and left the project on hold over the years.  I'm finally back due to nostalgic reasons to figure it out once and for all and possibly help others get it working.

.

But to prove I was a customer and did purchase from you I have dug up my copy of the program and made a DOS directory listing and scrambled characters out of it to prevent pirates from seeing the actual filenames or other recognizable info regarding the commercial files in case they could be used to search for it.  I think this is proof enough to compare and see they resemble the commercial files purchased by a customer.  You either believe me or you don't.

.

0@/09/201@  0@:@8 PM             3,@3@ HISTORY.TXT
0@/09/201@  0@:@4 PM             @,345 LICENSE.TXT
0@/07/201@  1@:@6 PM            @2,@90 MANUAL.TXT
0@/@2/201@  1@:@8 AM            @@,5@2 @AT@@@@@.EXE
0@/0@/201@  1@:@9 PM             @,1@6 README.TXT
0@/1@/200@  0@:@4 PM             @,2@6 @@@IT@@B.EXE
               6 File(s)         @2,@8@ bytes

.

98SE

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14 hours ago, rloew said:

Unpatched DOS 7 can handle 2TiB without any problem.

Which DOS are you talking about IBM PC DOS 7.0 or Windows 95/95A MS-DOS 7.0?  I already know DOS can handle 2TB drives but using them directly in DOS to do file copy operations I would advise to refrain.  It might be safe when you don't have too many files or an empty drive but if you load the drive up you might encounter the bug I'm talking about.

I have confirmed that 98SE DOS aka MS-DOS 7.10 has issues reading the entire drive under DOS using the DIR /S to list all the long file names, directories, subdirectories.  Eventually before it completes listing everything you will start encountering the garbage characters and what looks like a corrupted FAT.  The drive itself should still be good but I would not risk or attempt copying long files names to it or moving them around.  Also due to the way the directory listing appears corrupted you would have a hard time getting around in DOS or entering directories or knowing the filenames to copy so navigating such a drive in DOS would be a nightmare.

I have tested this in 98SE DOS on 2TB FAT32 years ago loaded full HD recordings with long file names that had to be 4GB or smaller max which meant having to stop the recording every 30 minutes to stay under this limit.  I tested smaller capacities of 1TB and 500 GB and they also had the same issue.  320GB I believe it did still have the issue but I would have to reverify.  250GB I think might be on the cusp and work fine but I would have to recheck to confirm.  But the 120GB/128GB should be able to fully list without any problems but I might do another test to reconfirm that since I usually don't have my boot drives completely filled and it could be that completely filling the drive the problem will appear as more long file names, directories, and subdirectories are the cause.

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