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2 TiB limit size in MBR hard drives


Cixert

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Partitionless (Floppy-like) USB Drives are not limited in size differently than any other Partition.

I called my approach "Extended MBR". You are the first person to call it EMBR. It is fully compatible with standard MBR for Partitions below 2TiB-8GiB.

If combined with a matching GPT, the Partitions can be used by anybody with a GPT compatible system without Patches as I have many times.

Despite your desires, I am not an XP Programmer. I know far less about XP than I do about 9x, so stop pestering me about writing XP Patches. So far I have only one XP targeted Product.

Your 8TB demonstration doesn't prove anything. 3TB, 8TB, or 16TB all face the same issues. The 2TiB limit still stands for Internal and non-4K USB Drives in older OSes.

Anyone could slap that 16TB SSD into an Enclosure and hook it up to XP.

I already have an Adapter that runs off USB Power. USB Power is not enough for 3.5" Hard Drives, only 2.5" Hard Drives.

My tests show that UNIATA is necessary, but not sufficient, to support the 4TB MBR approach in XP. I created a Partition that crossed the 2TiB limit. Windows XP just wrapped back to 0 when I tried to access
Sector 0x100000000 at it's relative address in the Partition.

If you are still suggesting to try more than 2 Partitions to get past 4TiB, then you clearly do not understand how MBRs work.

@bphlpt  Thanks for the nice summary. My statements about GPT are in response to 98SE, I am not pushing GPT.

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Internally Windows 9x uses 4K blocks so adding 4K support was practical. 64K would not work. DOS cannot handle 64K Sectors. It can support 32K Sectors but the performance is very poor.
I would think similar issues would be present in other OSes. I seriously doubt that 64K Logical Sector Drives will be mainstream for a very long time. 64K Physical Sectors maybe.
Pushing the MBR limit in this manner would not be worth it.

Hmm good point so 32KB sector drives would still be DOS compatible.  Poor performance how so?  I know formatting drives in DOS 32KB AUS is the default for large capacity drives so that's an interesting connection.

This would still push it 8x to 140.8GB MBR Max capacity so it would be worth it.

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No free lunch.

LOL we all need to eat. :yes:

7 hours ago, rloew said:

So far I have only one XP targeted Product.

18TB MBR drives it is till full 64TB GPT drives transition will be mandatory.

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I called my approach "Extended MBR". You are the first person to call it EMBR. It is fully compatible with standard MBR for Partitions below 2TiB-8GiB.

Yes I know but I shortened it for easier written digestion.  8GB to 2TB MBR partitions of course are a given compatibility.

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3TB, 8TB, or 16TB all face the same issues. The 2TiB limit still stands for Internal and non-4K USB Drives in older OSes.

Issues?  I think it works just fine as intended.  18TB MBR will be enough for most people and still work on every OS that I care about.  2TB for internal again is a non issue and more than plenty for just the OS unless you have no plans to ever move a huge amount of data to an external drive.  But if you insist on larger internal drive capacity in XP then that Paragon GPT Loader would be the easiest existing solution.  Your mentioning the lack of XP programming experience is unfortunate for us to hear not that I was forcing you to get your own GPT version out now but suggesting this could still be a possible money maker and I could see companies purchasing it.  Of course the XP pool is probably dwindling more and more over the next few years and we may see people finally go to a 64-Bit GPT capable OS so it won't matter anymore if no one does this within the next few years to keep interest.

Even with 6 to 8 SATA easily ports in modern motherboards you could still hook up 2TB drives to all of them and get up to 16TB and when needed use a SATA to USB adapter for external use on the fly.  This is the best alternative if you want all internal MBR drives that work.

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My tests show that UNIATA is necessary, but not sufficient, to support the 4TB MBR approach in XP. I created a Partition that crossed the 2TiB limit. Windows XP just wrapped back to 0 when I tried to access
Sector 0x100000000 at it's relative address in the Partition.

If you are still suggesting to try more than 2 Partitions to get past 4TiB, then you clearly do not understand how MBRs work.

That's a sad but valuable discovery but it just reconfirms we just stick to 2.2TB max for MBR internally or enjoy 18.0TB max for MBR externally for the least amount of headaches.

MBR at least for me is not necessary to be understood in full depth to use it and most software has built in safeguards to prevent any serious corruption.  I've been formatting and partitioning drives since the old MFM days and RLL, ESDI, IDE, and SCSI all worked fine with my technique and of course the final leap to SATA hasn't changed this over the years.  Most people simply won't be memorizing what all the MBR code inside means unless they are planning on making partition managers or using some advanced 3rd party Linux tool.  Simple testing is sufficient for most people to know how MBR works or doesn't and I already suspected the 2.2TB x2 being a possible way to gain access to the extra capacity without needing to dive into MBR.  The biggest problem is splitting the partitions so if you can't seamlessly bridge the full 4.4TB capacity and having wasted two drives letters it's not worth doing vs having a full 18TB for a single drive letter we already know which option is more efficient in the end.  Since XP is confirmed by you to not work with beyond 2.2TB due to the wrapping issue you described I guess it's a verified traditional MBR patch free death sentence.

It was one of the issues contemplated as soon as the first 2TB 3.5" drives were out around 2009 and it took awhile before WD released the first 2TB external USB powered models since it was so close to the barrier limit.  Then the long wait for the release of 3TB when only 3.5" came out first and no sign of a 3TB MBR 2.5" that worked in XP so all hope of that being possible was put on hold.  Then XP support dropped by MS made it less likely any of these major companies was going to make these special capacity breaking 2.5" drives for 3TB and up like their 3.5" models and trust me I kept my eye on all of them for any good news.

Your wrap around conclusion reminded me of the corruption on 98SE with a 160GB drive that nuked itself as I started filling the drive with data to near full capacity.  Back then there was not even a warning on the hard drive box which should have been for users about this problem with LBA28.

Edited by 98SE
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13 hours ago, 98SE said:

What exact roadblocks did you encounter that could not be resolved?

Also why did you have to use Windows 7 instead of just XP 32-Bit in your testing?

What software did you use to modify and add the partition and addresses.  Maybe doing in within XP 32-Bit on one of my larger drives (minus) the adapter we would be able to test beyond just 4TB to verify if multiple 2.199 Partitions could be created and work without special drivers as long as XP SP1 was installed.

From what I gathered it was possible to only extend one partition of 2.2TB over the first partition as long as the partition started before the end of the first 2.2TB range in your initial experiments.

Had you contemplated adding another 2.2TB partition possibility if you had a larger drive?

Since you both studied this low level stuff more intensely than I would ever have.

Let's say we had a 10.0TB hard drive just to simply the math.

 

98SE

Really, it is ALL written up ALREADY in this thread, please RE-READ (and re-read again, and again the related posts) NO value higher than 0xFFFFFFFF is possible in any of the 2 fields related to LBA addressing (Start Address and Size).

There is NO space for any bigger value.

Imagine that you have a cabinet with 8 drawers, each drawer can either contain one single object (and no more than one).

How many objects can you store in the cabinet?

8 and no more than 8.

Now you have a field 8 characters in length, how many characters can you store in this 8 characters field?

8 and no more than 8.

Since allowed characters are 0123456789ABCDEF, knowing that F represents the bigger possible number, what is the biggest you can write?

FFFFFFFF and no more than FFFFFFFF

Now these are hex numbers, you can use Windows calculator to play with them just fine, 0xFFFFFFFF (hex) is  4,294,967,295 (decimal).

What happens if you sum 1 to 0xFFFFFFFF?

Here:

0xFFFFFFFF+0x1=0x100000000

you need 9 characters, as the 8 you have available will be 00000000.

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Could Partitions #2, #3, #4, #5 Partition location information be stored in Part#1 so any reference to those Partitions could be accessed correctly?

Sure :), this is what we (highly specialized tehnicians) call "logical volumes inside Extended Partition" and exists since DOS 3.2 or so.

The only issue here is that the Extended Partition "contains" the logical volumes, so it must be bigger that the sum of all volumes inside it, with a maximum size of - guess it - 0xFFFFFFFF.

Would such an Extended Partition with a "fake" (limited to 0xFFFFFFFF size) work nonetheless through the chain of EMBR's (notwithstanding the name RLoew used, this is another thing, the term EMBR is commonly used to indicate the Extended MBR's that allow indexing logical volumes inside the Extended partition).

So the Extended has values:

0x00000800 0xFFFFFFFF <- i.e. it begins at offset 2048 and extends for 4,294,967,295 sectors

The values for the first volume in the EMBR at  0x00000100 are as well:

0x00000800 0xFFFFFFFF<- i.e. it begins at 2048+2048=4096 and extends for 4,294,967,295 sectors

Now where would the next volume begin? At 2048+2048+4,294,967,295=4,294,971,391, i.e. 0x100000FFF that - once written in the space available will become 0x00000FFF, or 4,095, neatly beginning before the first volume.  :whistle:

 

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The other big question was did either of you see a way to bridge the two partitions to show up as one large contiguous chunk and appear as one partition somehow to the OS?

Sure, it is just a matter of writing a driver (a kernel one will be needed for having the disk bootable) capable of accessing the whole disk RAW and create an on-the-fly structure virtually combining two or more extents in a single virtual volume.:w00t:

The hint about a (super-)floppy (that you didn't seemingly catch) by cdob is actually an interesting one, however. :thumbup and could well be the target for a further experiment.

Most probably a filter driver (such as the reversed dummydisk,sys) to make the hard disk a "Removable" (please read as "non-partitioned") device might be needed (or maybe not) for the test on an internal disk.

The test on a USB super-floppy makes little sense since (if) the USB adapter already translates sector size to 4 Kb, there are no issues up to 17.6 Tb, thus it sounds more than anything else a solution in search of a problem.

It would be needed an USB adapter capable of accessing >2.2Tb disks while NOT translating sector size, which looks even more pointless. :dubbio:

jaclaz

 

 

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7 hours ago, rloew said:

I already have an Adapter that runs off USB Power. USB Power is not enough for 3.5" Hard Drives, only 2.5" Hard Drives.

More than that, a 3.5" disk needs two voltages, 5V and 12V, while the USB (besides the limited current of 500 mA that can be delivered through it in USB 2.0 or 900 mA in USB 3.0) only provides the single voltage of 5V.

In theory - and this is just theory - provided that an USB port capable of delivering enough current such as a USB-C that can go up to 1.5 or 3.0 A it would be possible to have a voltage elevator to provide the 12V from the 5V and if/when a suitable port and USB cable conforming to the newish PD protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Power_Delivery_.28PD.29

also voltages of 15 V (that can be easily reduced to 12 V) might become available.

jaclaz

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1 hour ago, 98SE said:

MBR at least for me is not necessary to be understood in full depth to use it and most software has built in safeguards to prevent any serious corruption.

Sure :), try changing the active partition in XP Disk Manager on a MB aligned volume. :whistle:

http://reboot.pro/topic/9897-vistawin7-versus-xp-partitioning-issue/

jaclaz

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17 hours ago, 98SE said:

What exact roadblocks did you encounter that could not be resolved?

Also why did you have to use Windows 7 instead of just XP 32-Bit in your testing?

The roadblock of not getting the UNIATA driver to install "as expected" and Windows XP not being able to see the partitions, only raw extent.

I'm in a modern shop. As you can imagine, I do not happen to have Windows XP images available for modern systems. One testing requirement was for an OS that did not support UEFI, so Windows 7 32bit was chosen.

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3 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

The roadblock of not getting the UNIATA driver to install "as expected" and Windows XP not being able to see the partitions, only raw extent.

It's been a long time since I danced around with UNIATA... however, way back when, in times my main machine was and Athlon XP 3000+ on an A7V600-X, I've never been able to get it to work with UNIATA (it became unbootable), while it worked beautifully with the (proper) VIA drivers... Its southbridge was the usual VT8237 (2 IDE M + 2 IDE S + 2 SATA I ). I gave up (it was out of curiousity I was trying to install UNIATA, after all) and never tried anything with UNIATA again. So... just in case the mobo you used has a VIA chipset... if I ever were to try anything again, I'd use Intel processor + chipset, just in case.

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Hmm good point so 32KB sector drives would still be DOS compatible.  Poor performance how so?

DOS puts it's Sector Buffers in a single Segment. With a 32-Bit Sector plus a few Bytes of overhead, only one Sector will fit.
I did a file compare using a program that read the files in small pieces. It would have run for hours, even on fairly small files.
When I analyzed it, DOS was reading a Sector to supply a small piece of one File, then reading a Sector to supply a small piece of the second File.
It then had to repeat this process on the same two Sectors until all of them had been transferred to the Program, before going on to the next pair of Sectors.

Switching to 16K Sectors, allowed 3 Buffers and the Program ran at a reasonable rate. 

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I know formatting drives in DOS 32KB AUS is the default for large capacity drives so that's an interesting connection.

 

No connection. I have increased the Cluster Size limit to 128KB with 512 Byte Sectors or 8MB with 32K Sectors.

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This would still push it 8x to 140.8GB MBR Max capacity so it would be worth it.

I already did it.

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LOL we all need to eat. :yes:

Tell that to the waitress when she hands you the bill.

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Yes I know but I shortened it for easier written digestion.

Then don't blame me for choosing it.

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8GB to 2TB MBR partitions of course are a given compatibility.

Not necessarily.
The standard MBR area does not have a granularity limitation so the first 8GB is available as normal. The reserved area is at the top.

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Issues?  I think it works just fine as intended.

I am referring to the issues that occur when exceeding 2TiB in general, not your specific case.

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18TB MBR will be enough for most people and still work on every OS that I care about.

I thought you cared about Windows 9x. 

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2TB for internal again is a non issue and more than plenty for just the OS unless you have no plans to ever move a huge amount of data to an external drive.

How often do you move TeraBytes of data to or from USB Drives?
It takes a long time with Internal Drives, far longer with USB.
I can backup my 4TB Internal Drives to another Internal Drive in about 8 hours using a DOS Program I wrote. It would take 24 hours in Windows. I hate to think how long it would take with USB. 

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But if you insist on larger internal drive capacity in XP then that Paragon GPT Loader would be the easiest existing solution.

So far. 

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Your mentioning the lack of XP programming experience is unfortunate for us to hear not that I was forcing you to get your own GPT version out now but suggesting this could still be a possible money maker and I could see companies purchasing it. Of course the XP pool is probably dwindling more and more over the next few years and we may see people finally go to a 64-Bit GPT capable OS so it won't matter anymore if no one does this within the next few years to keep interest.

By your own statements it doesn't sound very profitable.
If I could solve the Math issue in XP, it would be far easier to implement my EMBR than a GPT Loader or support.

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Even with 6 to 8 SATA easily ports in modern motherboards you could still hook up 2TB drives to all of them and get up to 16TB and when needed use a SATA to USB adapter for external use on the fly.  This is the best alternative if you want all internal MBR drives that work.

That's a sad but valuable discovery but it just reconfirms we just stick to 2.2TB max for MBR internally or enjoy 18.0TB max for MBR externally for the least amount of headaches.

 

Going higher has not been a headache for my Customers or me.

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MBR at least for me is not necessary to be understood in full depth to use it and most software has built in safeguards to prevent any serious corruption. 

I think Jaclaz summed up the reason why you cannot extrapolate to three of more 2TiB Partitions. You keep asking about going past 4TiB.

 @jaclaz Extended Partitions are called EBRs not EMBRs. There is a third-party EMBR for a different purpose.

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I've been formatting and partitioning drives since the old MFM days and RLL, ESDI, IDE, and SCSI all worked fine with my technique and of course the final leap to SATA hasn't changed this over the years.  Most people simply won't be memorizing what all the MBR code inside means unless they are planning on making partition managers or using some advanced 3rd party Linux tool. 

Not 4TiB Drives.

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Simple testing is sufficient for most people to know how MBR works or doesn't and I already suspected the 2.2TB x2 being a possible way to gain access to the extra capacity without needing to dive into MBR.

I was aware of the possibility when I first worked on the 2TiB Problem. Only a two-fold improvement. I went for a 256-fold improvement.

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The biggest problem is splitting the partitions so if you can't seamlessly bridge the full 4.4TB capacity and having wasted two drives letters it's not worth doing vs having a full 18TB for a single drive letter we already know which option is more efficient in the end.

More efficient for Drive Letters but less for performance. 

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Since XP is confirmed by you to not work with beyond 2.2TB due to the wrapping issue you described I guess it's a verified traditional MBR patch free death sentence.

 

Presumably Paragon found a solution. I have also seen others that make the Hard Drive look like multiple smaller Hard Drives. I already did this with Windows 9x but chose EMBR as a better solution.

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It was one of the issues contemplated as soon as the first 2TB 3.5" drives were out around 2009 and it took awhile before WD released the first 2TB external USB powered models since it was so close to the barrier limit.  Then the long wait for the release of 3TB when only 3.5" came out first and no sign of a 3TB MBR 2.5" that worked in XP so all hope of that being possible was put on hold.  Then XP support dropped by MS made it less likely any of these major companies was going to make these special capacity breaking 2.5" drives for 3TB and up like their 3.5" models and trust me I kept my eye on all of them for any good news.

 

There is no reason that >2TiB 2.5" Hard Drives or SSDs won't become available in the future. You just have to wait for the technology to improve.

I believe there may have been a warning or they simply dropped Windows 9x from the compatible OS list.

14 hours ago, jaclaz said:

The hint about a (super-)floppy (that you didn't seemingly catch) by cdob is actually an interesting one, however. :thumbup and could well be the target for a further experiment.

Most probably a filter driver (such as the reversed dummydisk,sys) to make the hard disk a "Removable" (please read as "non-partitioned") device might be needed (or maybe not) for the test on an internal disk.

The test on a USB super-floppy makes little sense since (if) the USB adapter already translates sector size to 4 Kb, there are no issues up to 17.6 Tb, thus it sounds more than anything else a solution in search of a problem.

It would be needed an USB adapter capable of accessing >2.2Tb disks while NOT translating sector size, which looks even more pointless. :dubbio:

 

 A partitionless (super-floppy) Disk is an interesting possibility. It would have to be NTFS to push the limit.
Unfortunately, it probably would not work in XP for the same reasons as the 4TiB approach unless USB does not have the Math Problem.
I do have a 4TB USB Drive that is not translated, I could test with. Pointless maybe but inexpensive.

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14 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Sure :), try changing the active partition in XP Disk Manager on a MB aligned volume.

Oh, you just reminded me how tricky it was to create an MB aligned bootable software mirror volume for XP on AHCI SATA controller. Hope i never have to do this quest again...

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4 hours ago, rloew said:

DOS puts it's Sector Buffers in a single Segment. With a 32-Bit Sector plus a few Bytes of overhead, only one Sector will fit.
I did a file compare using a program that read the files in small pieces. It would have run for hours, even on fairly small files.
When I analyzed it, DOS was reading a Sector to supply a small piece of one File, then reading a Sector to supply a small piece of the second File.
It then had to repeat this process on the same two Sectors until all of them had been transferred to the Program, before going on to the next pair of Sectors.

Switching to 16K Sectors, allowed 3 Buffers and the Program ran at a reasonable rate. 

No connection. I have increased the Cluster Size limit to 128KB with 512 Byte Sectors or 8MB with 32K Sectors.

So you feel 16KB sector drives to be the best transitional upgrade from 4KB sector drives if hard drive manufacturers were to maintain DOS compatibility.

But again we probably both would be using 512 Byte drives as a Primary Drive anyhow so this is just a minor annoyance and we both have our own stockpile of legacy drives that this won't be an issue.

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I already did it.

Only with the DDO but not the real deal yet which will be possibly a decade from now.

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Tell that to the waitress when she hands you the bill.

Yes whenever I get the chance to go out anymore.  But when I do I give a 20% Tip sometimes 25%.

These days it's the occasional drive thru so no waitresses or waiters.

We got to spend our money wisely these days.

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Then don't blame me for choosing it.

Never did.

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I thought you cared about Windows 9x. 

Sure I still use it for bootable recovery.  If only Multicore was possible to use just like XP.  Even tricking 9X/ME to use one core per process/application would be a poor man's multicore balancing but would spread the processing power away from just one core.  That's the biggest modern obstacle I see now.  The memory issue isn't too big of a deal but a Windows 9X/ME internal based Ramdrive rather than DOS based to use the > 4GB region would have been a blessing and match my XP Ramdrive in robustness.  Only other upgrades that would benefit is possibly getting GeForce 8 series video cards with HDMI ports to work in 9X/ME to increase the visual quality.  Sadly none of these features are going to be addressed making 9X/ME very limited in functionality.  I know you are focused on money and nothing is free.  But I don't even know if anyone else out there could trump these issues for good.

On a positive note, I did some preliminary tests on an AMD AM4 Motherboard and 98SE worked on it.  There was no memory issue like ragnargd had experienced.  AM4 and Z170 both can boot into 98SE.  I can't explain why his setup didn't work.  We will never know the truth.
 

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How often do you move TeraBytes of data to or from USB Drives?

It takes a long time with Internal Drives, far longer with USB.

It takes a long time.  However that was with USB 2.0.  On USB 3.0 I'm seeing and although Dencorso had a different benchmark result my own real time transfers between USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0 look to be about 3.0 times faster.  I might have to use a benchmark tool to see what it calculates any programs come to mind?

But TBs yes I have had to transfer between two 8TB drives.  This was before I figured out the cause of the lag.  When recording 10 HD video streams simultaneously to one drive (especially more noticeable on laptop 2.5" drives) around 3-4 HD streams it eventually couldn't keep up and would cause a complete lag out or hiccup in the recording.  This was using 512 Bytes Allocation Unit sizes.  Later I switched to 4KB AUS but even recording around 4-6 HD Video streams the same thing happened.  I finally switched to 64KB AUS and no more hiccups.

I believe it's all those Allocation Units causing a bandwidth jam of some sort.  So while 64KB are quite large and inefficient for small text files, large HD video files love it.

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I can backup my 4TB Internal Drives to another Internal Drive in about 8 hours using a DOS Program I wrote. It would take 24 hours in Windows. I hate to think how long it would take with USB. 

8TB external USB drives even at USB 2.0 speeds can handle 8-10 HD Video stream recording just fine.  USB 3.0 is mainly for video splicing.  But with USB 3.0 in Vista this would cut down the transfer rates to a 1/3 of the time.  With Windows 7 this might be improved with Intel USB 3.0 xHCI drivers.  Also most of this transferring is going on in the background or while I'm asleep.  DOS you can't multitask and doesn't have Intel USB 3.0 xHCI transfer rate speeds support so you will be operating at USB 2.0 speeds anyhow so no match for Windows 7.

For internal drives yes 2TB would be the best MBR fastest transfer while maintaining legacy MBR compatibility.  I kept filling up these 2TB external USB drives so often that it was necessary to switch to 8TB drives at a cost of using a power adapter but saving 3 USB ports.  When 18TB 2.5" is affordable these will be the go to drives in the future and reduce my drives to half their numbers per USB port.

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So far. 

Yup and hopefully an internal GPT Loader won't be necessary till 64TB or 128TB or stall till 256TB where it is maxed out for internal drives and affordable to the masses.  I think if I can hold out on 18TB MBR 2.5" drives I'll be okay with not going full GPT.  An XP GPT Loader for internal and external USB drives would only accelerate my pace to GPT adoption as early as 20TB if 18TB is truly the predicted testable MBR max.

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By your own statements it doesn't sound very profitable.
If I could solve the Math issue in XP, it would be far easier to implement my EMBR than a GPT Loader or support.

Well XP is still holding around 5-6% Globally so I wouldn't say it's not very profitable.  I'm saying if you came out with a fully functional 2K/XP GPT Loader for internal and external drives today you could start milking it.  It's like you are holding the fort door from opening.  But once the fort door is thrust open it's too late and you're slaughtered.  So think of it this way.  GPT drives in XP today people won't flock to Vista, W7, W10 because of storage capacity constraints and maintaining forward compatibility with these newer Operating Systems so it's a game changer.  The only other upgrade feature would be giving XP 32-Bit OS memory support beyond 3GB say even to 128GB like its XP Professional 64-Bit counterpart.  Although the 128GB might be overkill today so pushing it to 8GB->16GB OS usable memory would probably be sufficient today.  The rest could still be reserved for the XP Ramdrive.  And the last linchpin would be when Intel USB 3.0 xHCI driver for Windows XP 32-Bit / 64-Bit and possibly Vista 32/64-Bit exists.  These features would breathe possibly another decade of life into these relics.

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More efficient for Drive Letters but less for performance. 

Performance is quite sufficient on USB 2.0.  On USB 3.0 it is a substantial improvement but it's the video editing part that is demanding so using a Ramdrive to store the file temporarily speeds things up.

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Presumably Paragon found a solution. I have also seen others that make the Hard Drive look like multiple smaller Hard Drives. I already did this with Windows 9x but chose EMBR as a better solution.

Yes in 2TB chunks or limited to the first 2TB.  GPT Mounter was one.  But not one has the capability to read/write to an external GPT drive on 2K / XP just yet. -_-

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I believe there may have been a warning or they simply dropped Windows 9x from the compatible OS list.

No warning on the outside manufacturer box at all.  Yes I still have these.  It was a Maxtor brand when they were well known in the industry dating back to the MFM days.  I have a few of these 5 1/4" behemoths.  They were loud but considered the best at the time.  It was a painful lesson that instilled in me to stick to hardware solutions than software solutions.  128GB drives you never have to worry about data corruption which has carried with me to this date despite the 2TB barrier being broken there's just something comfortable with using these older lower capacity drives since DOS/3.1/9X/ME/NT 3.X/4.0 don't use up a lot of space.

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The hint about a (super-)floppy (that you didn't seemingly catch) by cdob is actually an interesting one, however.  and could well be the target for a further experiment.

Most probably a filter driver (such as the reversed dummydisk,sys) to make the hard disk a "Removable" (please read as "non-partitioned") device might be needed (or maybe not) for the test on an internal disk.

The test on a USB super-floppy makes little sense since (if) the USB adapter already translates sector size to 4 Kb, there are no issues up to 17.6 Tb, thus it sounds more than anything else a solution in search of a problem.

There's a difference between "Floppy" vs "Super Floppy" although the LS-120 and LS-240 would probably be known as" Super Floppies" which I own.  If there's any need to experiment then a complete write up of what needs to be done but personally I'm not sure what the point of that would have been since 8TB as one NTFS partition works fine the way it is but on the 3TB it might be worth playing around since I have no valuable data on it just yet. -- Jaclaz?  I'd still like to clone it first for people to analyze or restore back to factory new condition.

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It would be needed an USB adapter capable of accessing >2.2Tb disks while NOT translating sector size, which looks even more pointless.

These exist and yes what would be the point of these?

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A partitionless (super-floppy) Disk is an interesting possibility. It would have to be NTFS to push the limit.
Unfortunately, it probably would not work in XP for the same reasons as the 4TiB approach unless USB does not have the Math Problem.
I do have a 4TB USB Drive that is not translated, I could test with. Pointless maybe but inexpensive.

So you can't partition it at all?

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https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-disk-director-forum/what-super-floppy

As I understand it now, 'super floppy' means a removable drive that does not have partitions.
The best way to make sure you always get partitions might be to use DISKPART to manage the drive/volume.
I could be wrong.

I've had a few of these as Flash drives.  But by this definition a USB floppy drive is a 1.44MB Super Floppy.

Edited by 98SE
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So you feel 16KB sector drives to be the best transitional upgrade from 4KB sector drives if hard drive manufacturers were to maintain DOS compatibility.

That would be the highest you might go with my Patched DOS.  Standard DOS only supports 512 Byte Sectors.

If you are using my Patched DOS, you might as well use my EMBR as well. You won't need 16KB Sectors until you exceed 16TiB Per Partition or 384TiB total.

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Yes whenever I get the chance to go out anymore.  But when I do I give a 20% Tip sometimes 25%.

These days it's the occasional drive thru so no waitresses or waiters.

We got to spend our money wisely these days.

My point was that it is not free.

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Sure I still use it for bootable recovery.  If only Multicore was possible to use just like XP.  Even tricking 9X/ME to use one core per process/application would be a poor man's multicore balancing but would spread the processing power away from just one core.  That's the biggest modern obstacle I see now.

I have a Multi-Core API that lets you write Applications that you other Cores.

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 The memory issue isn't too big of a deal but a Windows 9X/ME internal based Ramdrive rather than DOS based to use the > 4GB region would have been a blessing and match my XP Ramdrive in robustness.

Writing a DOS RAMDisk was much simpler.

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 Only other upgrades that would benefit is possibly getting GeForce 8 series video cards with HDMI ports to work in 9X/ME to increase the visual quality.  Sadly none of these features are going to be addressed making 9X/ME very limited in functionality. 

 You will have to bug nVidia about that.

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On a positive note, I did some preliminary tests on an AMD AM4 Motherboard and 98SE worked on it.  There was no memory issue like ragnargd had experienced.  AM4 and Z170 both can boot into 98SE. 

Good.

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It takes a long time.  However that was with USB 2.0.  On USB 3.0 I'm seeing and although Dencorso had a different benchmark result my own real time transfers between USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0 look to be about 3.0 times faster.  I might have to use a benchmark tool to see what it calculates any programs come to mind?

There is no USB 3 for Windows 9x. I plan to do some more work in this in the near future.

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But TBs yes I have had to transfer between two 8TB drives.  This was before I figured out the cause of the lag.  When recording 10 HD video streams simultaneously to one drive (especially more noticeable on laptop 2.5" drives) around 3-4 HD streams it eventually couldn't keep up and would cause a complete lag out or hiccup in the recording.  This was using 512 Bytes Allocation Unit sizes. 

Why would you use 512 Byte Clusters on any FAT32 Partition?
The default is 4K for the smallest ones and 32K for large ones.

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Later I switched to 4KB AUS but even recording around 4-6 HD Video streams the same thing happened.  I finally switched to 64KB AUS and no more hiccups.

I believe it's all those Allocation Units causing a bandwidth jam of some sort.  So while 64KB are quite large and inefficient for small text files, large HD video files love it.

Not surprised.

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8TB external USB drives even at USB 2.0 speeds can handle 8-10 HD Video stream recording just fine.  USB 3.0 is mainly for video splicing.  But with USB 3.0 in Vista this would cut down the transfer rates to a 1/3 of the time.  With Windows 7 this might be improved with Intel USB 3.0 xHCI drivers.  Also most of this transferring is going on in the background or while I'm asleep.  DOS you can't multitask and doesn't have Intel USB 3.0 xHCI transfer rate speeds support so you will be operating at USB 2.0 speeds anyhow so no match for Windows 7.

For internal drives yes 2TB would be the best MBR fastest transfer while maintaining legacy MBR compatibility.  I kept filling up these 2TB external USB drives so often that it was necessary to switch to 8TB drives at a cost of using a power adapter but saving 3 USB ports.  When 18TB 2.5" is affordable these will be the go to drives in the future and reduce my drives to half their numbers per USB port.

With my EMBR I get full speed AND reduced Drive Count at the same time. I am also not limited to total size of 16TiB.

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Well XP is still holding around 5-6% Globally so I wouldn't say it's not very profitable.  I'm saying if you came out with a fully functional 2K/XP GPT Loader for internal and external drives today you could start milking it.  It's like you are holding the fort door from opening.  But once the fort door is thrust open it's too late and you're slaughtered.  So think of it this way.  GPT drives in XP today people won't flock to Vista, W7, W10 because of storage capacity constraints and maintaining forward compatibility with these newer Operating Systems so it's a game changer. 

I did say that XP is not my area of expertise. 

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The only other upgrade feature would be giving XP 32-Bit OS memory support beyond 3GB say even to 128GB like its XP Professional 64-Bit counterpart.  Although the 128GB might be overkill today so pushing it to 8GB->16GB OS usable memory would probably be sufficient today.

Already done. Try reading the XP Forum. 

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And the last linchpin would be when Intel USB 3.0 xHCI driver for Windows XP 32-Bit / 64-Bit and possibly Vista 32/64-Bit exists.  These features would breathe possibly another decade of life into these relics.

There are other XP USB 3.0 Drivers such as Asmedia.

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No warning on the outside manufacturer box at all.  Yes I still have these.  It was a Maxtor brand when they were well known in the industry dating back to the MFM days.  I have a few of these 5 1/4" behemoths.  They were loud but considered the best at the time.  It was a painful lesson that instilled in me to stick to hardware solutions than software solutions.  128GB drives you never have to worry about data corruption which has carried with me to this date despite the 2TB barrier being broken there's just something comfortable with using these older lower capacity drives since DOS/3.1/9X/ME/NT 3.X/4.0 don't use up a lot of space.

I was the first to break the 137GB barrier on Windows 9x. If you want to live with 120GB Drives, that's up to you. I will stick with my 4TB and 6TB Drives.

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There's a difference between "Floppy" vs "Super Floppy" although the LS-120 and LS-240 would probably be known as" Super Floppies" which I own.

The distinction is in size.

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If there's any need to experiment then a complete write up of what needs to be done but personally I'm not sure what the point of that would have been since 8TB as one NTFS partition works fine the way it is but on the 3TB it might be worth playing around since I have no valuable data on it just yet. -- Jaclaz?  I'd still like to clone it first for people to analyze or restore back to factory new condition.

I only bother to save what's on a new Drive when it has some software pre-stored on it, not just an empty Partition.

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These exist and yes what would be the point of these?

According to you these are the new normal.

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So you can't partition it at all?

A Floppy or Super-Floppy has no MBR or Partitions, just a PBR to Boot. When booted they become A:.

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I've had a few of these as Flash drives.  But by this definition a USB floppy drive is a 1.44MB Super Floppy.

Size matters. 2.88MB and below is a Floppy. Super means bigger.

Edited by rloew
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2 hours ago, rloew said:

That would be the highest you might go with my Patched DOS.  Standard DOS only supports 512 Byte Sectors.

If you are using my Patched DOS, you might as well use my EMBR as well. You won't need 16KB Sectors until you exceed 16TiB Per Partition or 384TiB total.

I see I thought you were stating regular 98SE DOS could handle 32KB Byte Sectors.  There must be a lot of people using your EMBR I assume if they are using your Patched DOS.  But how many are using Patched DOS on say a SkyLake or Coffee Lake?  Those would probably be the ones needing this as most P4 up to Ivy Bridge users probably are sticking with 512 Byte Sector drives like myself for the time being.

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My point was that it is not free.

It's difficult to know what project will reap the benefits of your time spent.

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I have a Multi-Core API that lets you write Applications that you other Cores.

Yes I know I was speaking about a way for MultiCore support on all standard 9X/ME applications even with your patch it would benefit greatly.

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Writing a DOS RAMDisk was much simpler.

Writing DOS programs is your expertise but I wish there was a true 9X/ME Windows based one that took advantage of the 4GB+ memory range and highly configurable GUI interface like most XP commercial ones.  It's a shame no more true 9X/ME Windows programmers out there.

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 You will have to bug nVidia about that.

I'm sure plenty have already and were rejected as they focused on 2K/XP drivers.

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There is no USB 3 for Windows 9x. I plan to do some more work in this in the near future.

Hopefully it will pan out.  I have another idea that might fit your background.

On an Intel USB 2.0 Motherboard.

In 98SE DOS could you find a way for accessing the USB sound card for sound output?

Is there a way for you to detect USB devices using 98SE/ME based VXD or WDM files.

A gateway if you may of 9X/ME USB device detection but accessible under 98SE Real DOS.

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Why would you use 512 Byte Clusters on any FAT32 Partition?
The default is 4K for the smallest ones and 32K for large ones.

Small text files, web sites pages, pictures would suit this size in the past.  Recently everything has bloated in size so 4KB would be a better AUS for efficiency.

I remember researching the best partition size and 8GB was the optimal for FAT32.

The drives I'm using now are 8TB drives and NTFS only.

Anything over 2TB will most likely be NTFS.  The 512 Bytes AUS was done on a 2TB.  Another identical 2TB I used 4KB, and another at 64KB.

These three AUSs were tested and showed positive proof through recording multiple streams the 512 Bytes AUS lagged more likely when overloaded and 64KB didn't.

Most large capacity drives come preformatted for 4KB AUS but later I began switching to 64KB AUS since then.  This is where I had to transfer 8TB to another newly formatted 8TB with 64KB AUS.  Once all files were moved I reformatted the source drive to match the AUS.

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There are other XP USB 3.0 Drivers such as Asmedia.

Yes this doesn't exist on all Motherboards.  Intel USB 3.0 ports seem to be dominating.

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I was the first to break the 137GB barrier on Windows 9x. If you want to live with 120GB Drives, that's up to you. I will stick with my 4TB and 6TB Drives.

There are available 3rd Party alternatives but I would rather stick with not modifying my 9X.  9X is really only worth using on a P4 or P3 with ISA slots.  From what I've seen XP seems to run all 9X/ME software and on multiple cores so 9X is still more of a hobbyist OS today.

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I only bother to save what's on a new Drive when it has some software pre-stored on it, not just an empty Partition.

That's what I normally do.  But once you connect the drive via USB it probably will add a Recycled Bin Folder to the drive.

I'll probably wipe it soon enough to do a few quick tests.

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According to you these are the new normal.

Not exactly the new normal more like the stale normal for a few years but forced by MS when they dropped support of XP officially in 2014 they began shipping drives that were GPT with no adapters so only a GPT capable OS could only use them and not XP.  Had MS shut up and kept supporting XP I'm sure they would have continued shipping these XP compatible drives today.  If MS had stopped XP support in 2025 and 64TB drives were out they would have made new 64KB special adapters for XP to use them.

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A Floppy or Super-Floppy has no MBR or Partitions, just a PBR to Boot. When booted they become A:.

Yes but I don't think a Super-Floppy has to be bootable just as a regular floppy can just be formatted without sys and blank.

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Size matters. 2.88MB and below is a Floppy

Yes I know I still have 2.88MB Floppies.  Tape drives, Zip drives, and then the optical drives wiped them out.

2.88MB never standardized.  Maybe if they had jumped to 28.8MB it might have been worth adopting to fit 20 3.5" 1.44MB disks.  Going double the size wasn't enough to compete.

 

Edited by 98SE
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I see I thought you were stating regular 98SE DOS could handle 32KB Byte Sectors.

I said I got DOS to support 32K Sectors, not that standard DOS did.

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There must be a lot of people using your EMBR I assume if they are using your Patched DOS.

I put the Sector size Patches in IO.SYS along with the EMBR Patches so my Customers have both.

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But how many are using Patched DOS on say a SkyLake or Coffee Lake?  Those would probably be the ones needing this as most P4 up to Ivy Bridge users probably are sticking with 512 Byte Sector drives like myself for the time being.

 

No idea. The TeraByte Plus Package works with any CPU.

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Writing DOS programs is your expertise but I wish there was a true 9X/ME Windows based one that took advantage of the 4GB+ memory range and highly configurable GUI interface like most XP commercial ones.  It's a shame no more true 9X/ME Windows programmers out there.

 

I do Windows 9x programming as well. The DOS RAMDisks work well enough that making a Windows Version was not a priority. I probably could rewrite my USB Mass Storage Driver to act as a RAMDisk.

A GUI Interface is just fluff.

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On an Intel USB 2.0 Motherboard.

In 98SE DOS could you find a way for accessing the USB sound card for sound output?

 

USB Sound Cards and Adapters work fine with Windows 98. The Motherboard doesn't matter.

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Is there a way for you to detect USB devices using 98SE/ME based VXD or WDM files.

The standard Drivers do that.

 

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A gateway if you may of 9X/ME USB device detection but accessible under 98SE Real DOS.

 

If you are talking about DOS USB Drivers, some exist.

 

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Small text files, web sites pages, pictures would suit this size in the past.  Recently everything has bloated in size so 4KB would be a better AUS for efficiency.

I remember researching the best partition size and 8GB was the optimal for FAT32.

 

A long time ago.

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The drives I'm using now are 8TB drives and NTFS only.

Anything over 2TB will most likely be NTFS.  The 512 Bytes AUS was done on a 2TB.  Another identical 2TB I used 4KB, and another at 64KB.

These three AUSs were tested and showed positive proof through recording multiple streams the 512 Bytes AUS lagged more likely when overloaded and 64KB didn't.

 

Even if you are using a 2TB Drive, the FAT32 Partitions were nowhere near that size with 512 Bytes  or 4K AUS. The minimum AUS size for a FAT32 Partition larger than 1TiB is 8K.
64K AUS is considered non-standard. Unmodified DOS won't boot and DEBUG will not save data.

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Most large capacity drives come preformatted for 4KB AUS but later I began switching to 64KB AUS since then.  This is where I had to transfer 8TB to another newly formatted 8TB with 64KB AUS.  Once all files were moved I reformatted the source drive to match the AUS.

 

Maybe for NTFS, but FAT32 Partitions that size will use 32K AUS.

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There are available 3rd Party alternatives but I would rather stick with not modifying my 9X.

The VIA Driver has a bug, IAA is limited to Intel Controllers.

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That's what I normally do.  But once you connect the drive via USB it probably will add a Recycled Bin Folder to the drive.

 

I don't think it does if connect the Drive and grab the data without using  Explorer or other Windows Functions.

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Not exactly the new normal more like the stale normal for a few years but forced by MS when they dropped support of XP officially in 2014 they began shipping drives that were GPT with no adapters so only a GPT capable OS could only use them and not XP.  Had MS shut up and kept supporting XP I'm sure they would have continued shipping these XP compatible drives today.  If MS had stopped XP support in 2025 and 64TB drives were out they would have made new 64KB special adapters for XP to use them.

 

I keep telling you that 64K Logical Sectors will not happen.

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Yes but I don't think a Super-Floppy has to be bootable just as a regular floppy can just be formatted without sys and blank.

 

Your point?

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9 hours ago, rloew said:

I do Windows 9x programming as well. The DOS RAMDisks work well enough that making a Windows Version was not a priority. I probably could rewrite my USB Mass Storage Driver to act as a RAMDisk.

Whatever makes it easier to create it in 9X/ME and fully robust.

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A GUI Interface is just fluff.

Customers love the fluff. :yes: Guilty.

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USB Sound Cards and Adapters work fine with Windows 98. The Motherboard doesn't matter.

The standard Drivers do that.

If you are talking about DOS USB Drivers, some exist.

You kind of missed what I was asking.  Regarding Intel USB 2.0, in 98SE Real DOS (not inside 98SE OS) could you find a way to bridge USB device detection using the 9X/ME core system files?  So as long as the user owned a 98SE CD to get the core and system files and used your DOS/USB interface program it could then in 98SE Real DOS basically detect any USB devices (USB Keyboard, USB Mouse, USB audio device, USB gaming controller, USB network device) or whatever USB device that used 9X/ME native USB drivers without requiring an additional manufacture driver to work).  A lot of these USB devices simply are plug and play in 9X/ME.  If you could make 98SE Real DOS run as normal but with added 9X/ME USB detection that allowed any USB devices connected to the USB 2.0 ports like a USB sound device could then be plugged in and on a hardware level any Real DOS based game could directly access this USB sound device for audio output.  Adding a USB game controller would automatically work as if it were a legacy PC joystick.  Is this within your programming expertise?

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A long time ago.

8GB was still an optimal partition size for 98SE until probably a decade ago.  For daily 98SE usage today I'd probably go with a 16GB partition.

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Even if you are using a 2TB Drive, the FAT32 Partitions were nowhere near that size with 512 Bytes  or 4K AUS. The minimum AUS size for a FAT32 Partition larger than 1TiB is 8K.
64K AUS is considered non-standard. Unmodified DOS won't boot and DEBUG will not save data.

Maybe for NTFS, but FAT32 Partitions that size will use 32K AUS.

The 2TB drives are using NTFS not FAT32.  That's how the 512 Bytes, 4KB, and 64KB HD recording overload bandwidth test comparison was done.  Only a few earlier WD externals I had converted to full FAT32 and yes they used the large 32KB AUS as you described.  These earlier 2TB FAT32 drives I used for DVD ripping only since they used 1GB VOB file sizes max.  NTFS is geared toward > 4GB file sizes where Blu-rays and HD videos fall for > 2TB drives.  But all 2TB drives I have had since are using NTFS.

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I don't think it does if connect the Drive and grab the data without using  Explorer or other Windows Functions.

Perhaps by disabling AutoPlay it wouldn't tamper with the drive at all.  Not entirely sure.  Only a DOS clone would seem the safest.

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I keep telling you that 64K Logical Sectors will not happen.

I was giving it some thought.  It might not happen soon but given 64KB Physical sector drive size wouldn't actually be needed yet but if a pure 64KB Physical sector drive through the drive controller appeared as 64KB sectors and a proper OS support patch was done this would really benefit high transfer rates for large HD file sizes.

 

I started thinking about this USB adapter some more as I never really cared about it except that it worked.  The drive inside appears to be a 4K sector drive but with 512e out the hard drive Sata connector.

So the adapter doesn't really do any 4KB -> 512 Byte translation as I originally had thought since the drive does this natively.  It wouldn't matter if the hard drive had a 64KB sector size anymore to break the MBR barrier. It can be a 4KB sector drive or even a 512 Bytes sector size drive as both should work.  I think the adapter is really an address translator to the 32-Bit legacy limit.  So any drive over 18TB would probably still work and won't corrupt the drive since you couldn't access that region or anything above 18TB.  Now if this address translator could be dumped and modified you could actually get 256TB MBR or higher capacities as long as the source drive was 512e and made the proper address translation changes done on the translation adapter side.  Since there is a hard disk transition from 512 and 512e to pure 4KB sector drives it's hard to guess when 512e drives will no longer be made but the writing is on the wall and since Windows 7 64-Bit already understands 4KB sectors only XP 32-Bit and lower will be affected unless patched.  A new adapter board would need to be made to accept pure 4KB sector drives and do a conversion to do address translation to the 32-Bit limit and it would once again work on all Operating Systems at least from 2000 SP3 and XP SP1 and up for higher than 18TB MBR capacities.

Edited by 98SE
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