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FDISK shows full drive size, FORMAT shows 4 gig.


bizzybody

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Have you tried the bios LARGE mode for the hard drive setting?

rloew said:

> Windows 95 is NOT limited to 32GB. I am running it with 2TiB with my Hard Disk Patch. Otherwise it is limited to 137GB.

Is win-95 not similar to win-98 in that if you are using a sata controller with 32-bit 9x driver (and thus not using ESDI_506.pdr) then the 137 gb issue goes away?

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Hopefully someone will decide to mod the BIOS and fix whatever is wonky with it. First time I've ever seen a case like this where FDISK would partition the drive but FORMAT would not format the full size fdisk created. (Semi-fondly recalls the days of using DEBUG to access MFM controller BIOS low level formatting and using EDLIN and COPY to write autoexec.bat and config.sys files... on my very first hard drive of a massive five megabytes.)

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a BIOS mod. I did one myself and it took a fair amount of work. Your only solution is a DDO.

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@Nomen: A 40 GB SATA HDD? On an EPOX EP-BX3 ???

The OP claimed to have used such a large drive in the past with that board. I've had plenty of Slot-1 boards with BX chipsets and AGP slots, and I've never encountered an 8 gb hard drive limit with those - but then again I've never used anything other than Large-mode bios drive setting.

The 137 GB limit can be overcome using either LLXX's or RLoew's patches. But for the next limit (1 GiB) there's only RLoew's patch.

Please explain how I am able to attach 1 and 2 TB SATA drives to my win-98 systems and have the entire drives functional under win-98 - without the rloew patch?

Please explain why you will not include the caveat that it is totally possible to use large sata hard drives exceeding 137 gb under win-98 if there are win-98 SATA controller drivers for the hardware in question.

Since I have no direct experience with win-95 (since I stopped using it in 1999) I'm asking if the use of available win-95 32-bit SATA controller drivers will also allow 95 to exceed the 137 gb drive-size limitation the same way it does for win-98.

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The 137 GB limit can be overcome using either LLXX's or RLoew's patches. But for the next limit (1 GiB) there's only RLoew's patch.

Please explain how I am able to attach 1 and 2 TB SATA drives to my win-98 systems and have the entire drives functional under win-98 - without the rloew patch?

One cannot. One can use up to 500 GB PATA HDDs (I believe no larger IDE drives were ever released) by using LLXX's patch.

Old SATA controllers having drivers (usually for SATA 150, in RAID or IDE mode) can be used without any patch. Then again, that only works for SATA-150 or SATA-300 HDDs, since most SATA-600 HDDs cannot operate in SATA-150 mode. In any case, for FAT sizes exceeding 1 TiB, another patch (this one to vfat.vxd - available from Rloew) is required. And for controllers not having 9x SATA drivers, but capable of operating in IDE mode, Rloew's SATA patch is required, but the 137 GB patch is also required. If only AHCI mode is available, then it's no go.

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The 137 GB limit can be overcome using either LLXX's or RLoew's patches. But for the next limit (1 GiB) there's only RLoew's patch.

Please explain how I am able to attach 1 and 2 TB SATA drives to my win-98 systems and have the entire drives functional under win-98 - without the rloew patch?
One cannot. One can use up to 500 GB PATA HDDs (I believe no larger IDE drives were ever released) by using LLXX's patch.

 

I'm not talking about PATA drives.

 

Old SATA controllers having drivers (usually for SATA 150, in RAID or IDE mode) can be used without any patch. Then again, that only works for SATA-150 or SATA-300 HDDs, since most SATA-600 HDDs cannot operate in SATA-150 mode.

 

Everything I can find on the subject indicates that SATA-3 drives are backwards compatible with SATA-1 controllers. Some SATA-2/3 drives might have jumpers to set them to SATA-1 speed, but by all accounts if they don't then they should work when connected to SATA-1 controllers.

 

In any case, for FAT sizes exceeding 1 TiB, another patch (this one to vfat.vxd - available from Rloew) is required.

 

vfat.vxd does not exist (as a file) on my system. Do you actually run Windows 98 - on bare metal (not in a VM)? With large SATA hard drives with win-9x controller drivers?

This is what chkdsk tells me for one of my SATA drives:

===============

1,464,780,864 kilobytes total disk space

685,154,336 kilobytes free

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit

45,774,402 total allocation units on disk

21,411,073 available allocation units on disk

================

So I don't know if you are still trying to say that under _no_ circumstance can Win-98 have full access to SATA drives between 137 gb to 2 TB without using Rloew's patch. I'm trying to tell you that I have exactly that. I do have full access to any such drive that I connect to any of my win-98 systems with SATA-1 controllers - just by using the appropriate win-9x driver (SI3112r.mpd + SIISUPP.VXD). If I am somehow wrong about this, if I should not be able to do this, then I invite Rloew to explain the situation.

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In any case, for FAT sizes exceeding 1 TiB, another patch (this one to vfat.vxd - available from Rloew) is required.

 

vfat.vxd does not exist (as a file) on my system. Do you actually run Windows 98 - on bare metal (not in a VM)? With large SATA hard drives with win-9x controller drivers?

Because it is compressed into VMM32.VXD when Windows 9x is installed. Rest assured it IS present AND required. And therefore cannot be circumvented by using another driver besides ESDI_506.PDR.

Edited by LoneCrusader
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I don't use VMs at all. I run 98SE on two different  Asus A7V600-X. On one of them I have a 750 GB WD SATA-II HDD (WD7501AALS), set to SATA-I compatibility through a jumper, and run it with the VIA SATA RAID drivers I posted about many times (Via's SerialATA_V220E), without any patching, and access the full HDD as a single partition. WD SATA-III HDDs can be jumpered to operate in SATA-II mode but not in SATA-I mode, and are not recognized by VIA 8237 southbridge internal SATA controller.

 

I said partitions of more than 1 TiB can trash your data in certain circunstances, without a patch to VFAT.VxD. Notice I said 1 TiB, not 1 TB... Of course your unpatched system has VFAT.VxD, but it's packed inside VMM32.VxD.

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If you have a custom Driver, you are subject to the limits imposed by the Driver.

The generic VIA Driver has a bug in it so I would not recommend it.

The original ESDI_506.PDR Driver only supports 28-Bit Addressing so it is limited to 137GB so it needs to be Patched to go higher.

VFAT.VXD has a bug that MAY cause problems with Partitions larger than 1TiB. This is not a Hard Drive size limitation.

The bug relates to Partition alignment so it may appear or it may not appear, but it won't show until there is more than 1TiB of data in the Partition. Ignore at your own risk.

The MBR structure and a number of Driver Files limit addressing to 2TiB. I have a workaround to go higher.

All of the above limits apply to Windows 9x. BIOS Limits also apply.

Although it may seem that you can get away with using a larger Hard Drive than the BIOS supports as long as you boot quickly into Windows there are some operations that occur before

the Driver is loaded or in Safe Mode that can corrupt your system if the involved data ends up above the BIOS limit. This is where a DDO is needed.

BIOS caused corruption is often catastrophic as it tends to wrap around to zero.

The ESDI_506.PDR Driver often returns an error rather than access the wrong sector and it does not wrap to zero so the risk is less.

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@Nomen: A 40 GB SATA HDD? On an EPOX EP-BX3 ???

The OP claimed to have used such a large drive in the past with that board. I've had plenty of Slot-1 boards with BX chipsets and AGP slots, and I've never encountered an 8 gb hard drive limit with those - but then again I've never used anything other than Large-mode bios drive setting.

That's not the point: the EPOX EP-BX3 uses a PIIX4E southbrige, which knows nothing about SATA or anything else beyond  UltraDMA-33. So, the OP must be talking about PATA, not SATA.  

 

I'm not talking about PATA drives.

But the OP is. And so am I.

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@Nomen: A 40 GB SATA HDD? On an EPOX EP-BX3 ???

The OP claimed to have used such a large drive in the past with that board. I've had plenty of Slot-1 boards with BX chipsets and AGP slots, and I've never encountered an 8 gb hard drive limit with those - but then again I've never used anything other than Large-mode bios drive setting.

That's not the point: the EPOX EP-BX3 uses a PIIX4E southbrige, which knows nothing about SATA or anything else beyond  UltraDMA-33. So, the OP must be talking about PATA, not SATA.  

 

I'm not talking about PATA drives.

But the OP is. And so am I.

 

The Epox EP-BX3 has two USB 1.1 ports, one LPT, two RS232, two PATA and one floppy port - and that is it, aside from the AGP 2x and the PCI and ISA slots. Doesn't even have an internal header to connect more USB ports.

 

I may go ahead and hit it with SCANDISK to see if it trashes the format again after using more modern tools on Win 7 to setup and format the partitions. It doesn't take too long to install 95B on a 466Mhz Celeron (Socket 370 on a slotket) with 448 meg RAM. That's way more grunt than most Win95 installs ever saw back in the day.

 

If it fouls it up, I'll try the large setting in BIOS instead of the automatically detected LBA. I always liked Epox boards, they always seemed to be cutting edge with everything. The BIOS is supposed to support *up to* 65 gig and I'm using a 40 gig so there should NOT be any need for an overlay. Given the change history of the BIOS it's more likely that there's a glitch that just happens to screw with this particular drive that is newer than the board.

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Some drives have a jumper that allows a 8GB limitation, have you triple checked that? (I see everybody jumping on the 4Gig barrier but if 4Gig is half the drive... the drive is well seen as 8Gig). You could try to make one partition and see if it formats as 8Gig so you'd see if it is a software problem. I also remember an update for Win9x's "fdisk" from MS but I can't remember what version it was for nor what the problem was. Cheers.

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Here (Win98 and up) -

 

 

Too bad that the idea was to run Windows 95 (and NOT Windows 98, and not any other Windows version). :whistle:

 

@dencorso

And (just for the record) there is no manifested intention to run anything above 137 Gb, and not to go all the way up to over 1 Tb.

 

@bizzybody

You should NOT use any Windows NT system later than XP to partition that disk (unless you use diskpart  and not disk manager AND you have corrected the standard partition offsets in the Registry) as Vista :ph34r: and later have introduced by default a different convention for alignment and this may affect the operation of many program/tools (if not parts of the OS itself) running under Windows 9x/ME.

 

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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But the OP said they used a Win98 Boot Disk (first post), so...

 

FWIW, if I have a chance, I'll find the "free" DDO software version from (WD/Seagate/Fujitsu/Maxtor/Samsung?). It's an old version I have stored on my HDD but can't remember which Floppy Image it is. If you don't resolve it otherwise, i'll try to find it. ;)

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