Question about large drives in one of my old Packard Bell desktops

[billyb]

Trying to figure out if what I'm doing is headed for certain corruption of data.

Four of my ancient Packard Bells have outlived all my other original dos/98 days computers. I get mixed information on how one of them can/can not support large drives over 137gb. I routinely pop large fat32 drives inside and the full drive amounts always display fine and "seem" to work fine.

I have win98se 4.10.222 with a bunch of Soporific updates on this particular pentium 200 computer with 96mb of ram. Bought the machine new in 98 and use it for running old 98 and old dos programs. All seems to work fine.

The very-old bios shows autoconfigure as well as other choices like "lba" . I leave it on autoconfigure. I have two drive bays in the machine and the 40gb system drive stays there most of the time. I have sometimes formatted a 160gb drive (fat32) with something like Western Digital's data lifeguard tools (while that drive was in the second bay of the win98 computer itself) and I'll get a pop up saying that an overlay is required (which the WD routine wants to slap on before formatting.

As a test, I formatted the drive as fat32 160gb over on a Winxp machine (no overlay) and then put the 160gb drive into the old Packard Bell, restored a ghost image of win 98 there ... and all seems to work fine. The computer boots up, shows the full 160gb drive and no overlay prompts. When I work with programs on that drive, all seem to work okay during the tests.

When I reboot into dos or do a fast switch into dos from win 98, programs there also seem to work fine.

That right there throws me off. I thought Dos could never see huge drive amounts like I have in the machine.

I formatted a 250gb drive as fat32 on a Winxp machine and then popped that into the old packard bell bay #2 and booted up. Win98se now boots up with everything on its 160gb C drive and also sees the full 250gb (well, more like 232gb) on thd second drive for data storage.

I also bought a couple of Loew's apps including the large drive patch. He included a tester program called 48bitlba.

When I run his test program in dos (with a 40gb system drive and a 250gb storage drive popped inside), the loew program shows...

drive 1: 8.4gb= 16450560 Sectors.. not 48-bit disk

dirve 2 8.4gb= 16450560 Sectors..not 48-bit disk

Basically, I'm not sure how to intrepret that. Or the fact that I've been using these large drives without overlays. Loews notes seem to show that the bios doesn't support drives over 137gb. But I do pop in drives that large and larger inside and all seem to work. Am I cruising with hard drive time bombs here that may simpy abruptly corrupt data and crash?

It seems from the data I have, that these large drives shouldn't be working at all. But they do.

Anyone have info on how I should intrepret what I'm working with?

Edited April 10, 2012 by billyb

[rloew]

It sounds like the BIOS only supports 8GiB hard Drives.

DOS and Windows 98 (with my Patch) can handle 2TiB.

You see the whole capacity because all of the Drive tables are at the very bottom of each Disk.

If you try to put more than 8GiB of actual Data on a Disk while in DOS it will become instantly corrupted.

You can try filling up the disk with files as an experiment, before you commit the Disk to any real data.

Although Windows will not corrupt the Disk, related DOS activity can, so it is not safe.

An overlay is required. I had problems with Western Digital's Overlays so I wrote my own.

See the BOOTMAN Demo on my website for additional information.

[billyb]

Thanks for the tip. I have about 9gb on the C drive now (which is a 40gb drive) and for the first time last week, I was getting random notes that windows needed to fix registry errors. Don't know if that was a symptom, but that's what made me re-think the overlay situation. The machine is old so any number of things may happen at this point.

I've reformatted the drives, letting overlays be added and restored ghost 2003 images to the two drives I interchange as C drives. Also reformatted and added overlays to the larger storage drives.

Random thing about Ghost 2003. It won't let me make backups from drives that have overlays. Although I can restore existing images from my backup drive onto a new drive that does have an overlay. I've always run up against that and the important thing I guess is that my existing images are safe for restoring. The setup of the win98 machines don't change much. For any data I add other than programs, I just manually copy those files from time to time over to the storage drive for safety.

Thanks again Rloew!

[rloew]

There are different kinds of Overlays.

Some like mine and probably the Western Digital one you have, preserve the normal Sector numbering of the Drive. They just add additional Sectors to the area above the MBR.

The Disk can be used in a newer machine without activating the Overlay.

Some others shifted all of the Sectors making the Disk totally unreadable in any machine if the Overlay wasn't running. These Overlays turned a lot of people off to the whole idea of DDOs (Disk Drive Overlays).

I'm not sure why Ghost 2003 cannot back them up. I do not have a copy.

[dencorso]

Some like mine and probably the Western Digital one you have, preserve the normal Sector numbering of the Drive. They just add additional Sectors to the area above the MBR.

The Disk can be used in a newer machine without activating the Overlay.

Sorry, but you've got me confused: with all due respect, what area above the MBR? The MBR is in LBA 0.

[submix8c]

Random thing about Ghost 2003. It won't let me make backups from drives that have overlays. Although I can restore existing images from my backup drive onto a new drive that does have an overlay.

May I ask what "Options" you use? That seems a bit odd...

[rloew]

Some like mine and probably the Western Digital one you have, preserve the normal Sector numbering of the Drive. They just add additional Sectors to the area above the MBR.

The Disk can be used in a newer machine without activating the Overlay.

Sorry, but you've got me confused: with all due respect, what area above the MBR? The MBR is in LBA 0.

The MBR is in LBA 0.

The first Partition normally starts at LBA 63.

The space in between is available for DDOs, Boot Loaders, etc. And unfortunately viruses. Some Copy Protection code also hides data in this area.

[dencorso]

Oh! Now I see it! Of course: in my mind I usually picture the MBR on top, with all other sectors below it, while you were thinking of it as one usually does with a memory map, that is, the MBR on the bottom, with all other sectors above it. Sure!

Of course both representations are mental pictures, models which help one think about a concept, and both are equally valid (but confusion arises from two interlocutors using different mental pictures implicitly and taking it for granted each other is using the same model, as just happened).

Sorry, I should have mused longer about it, before posting... (which unfortunately is not that unusual with me).

Now, then, at least I can add a useful comment: Ghost 2003 can and will backup all the disk, including the DDO, *provided* one gives it the -ir command-line switch (it causes Ghost to create a bit-by-bit full disk image, not a simple "intelligent" partition image).

[billyb]

Now, then, at least I can add a useful comment: Ghost 2003 can and will backup all the disk, including the DDO, *provided* one gives it the -ir command-line switch (it causes Ghost to create a bit-by-bit full disk image, not a simple "intelligent" partition image).

Not sure how to do that but I'll check it out. The non-thinking way I've used Ghost 2003 all these years for win98se is to simply start up the ghost program while in windows (with my backup data drive in the second bay), create a folder on the second drive with today's date, navigate ghost to make the back up image there with standard compression and then click "start".

Ghost then reboots the computer and restarts into its pc-dos or dr-dos or whatever that is (only now, the drive overlay screen comes up just before the auto process starts) and then backs up.

Normally (with no overlay drive). all is fine and the integrity of the image checks out fine after all is done. And test restores work fine too.

But with an overlay drive, it's a no go for the backup .....

The thing that happens on an overlay drive (in fact happened again today when I tried a back up) is that Ghost gets going for an hour, doing the backup, and never stops... eventually even showing NEGATIVE numbers on the time remaining and mb remaing. And other whacky stuff like 110% completed. And it's not in verify mode either.

That's what I've always encountered when using overlay drives in past years on some of these oldest pentiums. In checking the topic out on the web, symantic has even replied to users with that problem that the overlay is the culprit.

No biggie.

My workaround in the past was simply to create a windows98 + autopatchers install on a non-overlay drive (of any size) and then immediately after the build... back it up with ghost. And then, format a drive with an overlay, and restore the image after the overlay boot screen appears.

Which is back to the way I'll do it again ... now that I'm back to using an overlay.

My entire running system setup for win98se is only about 6gb and hardly ever changes. So one or two backup images are all I really need to have around.

None of this may be a problem on the somewhat newer PII and P4 machines I have (once I get back to checking out win98se on those) . I just seem to keep using the oldest machines here because they still work. And that's sorta cool on its own

Edited April 11, 2012 by billyb