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Maximus Decim Cumulative Update ver.2.10


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nForce's drivers support more than 137 GB HDDs. Also VIA, SiS, ALi etc. supports more than 137 GB with their drivers on the Windows 98/ME. Intel also supports more than 137 GB on Win98/ME with their Application Accelerator product.

Can you explain me how I did successfully format the C:\ Drive to 200 GB (183 in fact. 200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.) with fdisk from the the WinMe CD when the nforce motherboard drivers weren't installed.

As well, after install of Win Me the drive was recognized as a 183 GB though the nForce motherboard drivers weren't installed yet.

200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.

As well I have looked in device properties and it does not seem to me that nForce has installed any driver to handle HDDs. The IDE controllers are standard Microsoft.

I have unpatched ESDI_506.PDR in my IOSUBSYS folder.

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Can you explain me how I did successfully format the C:\ Drive to 200 GB (183 in fact.  200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.) with fdisk from the the WinMe CD when the nforce motherboard drivers weren't installed.

As well, after install of Win Me the drive was recognized as a 183 GB though the nForce motherboard drivers weren't installed yet.

200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.

As well I have looked in device properties and it does not seem to me that nForce has  installed any driver to handle HDDs. The IDE controllers are standard Microsoft.

I have unpatched ESDI_506.PDR in my IOSUBSYS folder.

AFAIK these are several different things.

Size detection is easy, it is read from the harddrive by "IDENTIFY DEVICE" ATA command, words 60:61, and since the number of addressable sectors is 32-bit number, maximum supported size is 2048 GB.

Fdisk does no formating, it just writes the Partition Table contained in the Master Boot Record (MBR).

So far no problem with 128 GiB (137 GB) limit. This limit and therefore the problem of old OSes is caused by the fact that the old scheme of Logical Block Addressing (LBA) has 24 bits only. New LBA has 48-bits.

In practice, it may look like everyting works smoothly even on system that does not support LBA-48. But only before you cross the 137 GB border. After this border, you will start to write again from the beginning of the disk - overwriting the MBR and making your disk totally unusable with all data lost.

More information you can find here: http://www.48bitlba.com/

Petr

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Can you explain me how I did successfully format the C:\ Drive to 200 GB (183 in fact.  200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.) with fdisk from the the WinMe CD when the nforce motherboard drivers weren't installed.

As well, after install of Win Me the drive was recognized as a 183 GB though the nForce motherboard drivers weren't installed yet.

200=183 because 1024=1000 in fact I think.

As well I have looked in device properties and it does not seem to me that nForce has  installed any driver to handle HDDs. The IDE controllers are standard Microsoft.

I have unpatched ESDI_506.PDR in my IOSUBSYS folder.

Windows ME's FDISK supports big HDDs. So partitioning and formatting is not a problem. The problem is not the detection, too. The problem is to cross the 137 GB barrier.

Look Petr's comments, and 48bitlba.com for more information.

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The problem is to cross the 137 GB barrier.
What do you mean ? I have crossed it without problems on very standard hardware it seems.

I've read the doc entirely and if I had to believe what he writes, my system wouldn't handle my disks without his patch.

FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size. FAT32 uses smaller clusters (that is, 4K clusters for drives up to 8 Gbytes in size), resulting in 10 to15 percent more efficient use of disc space relative to large FAT16 partitions. FAT32 will only work on 512 Mbytes and larger drives. Microsoft’s bundled disc tools (Format, FDISK, Defrag, and MS-DOS based ScanDisk) have been revised to work with FAT32.
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In practice, it may look like everyting works smoothly even on system that does not support LBA-48. But only before you cross the 137 GB border. After this border, you will start to write again from the beginning of the disk - overwriting the MBR and making your disk totally unusable with all data lost.

Have you already been there yourself ? Are you sure of what you are saying ?

If true it's big issue.

And I would expect hard drives manufacturers to warn their customers of that issue as well as I would expect Microsoft to issue a fix as they still support the Win98SE/ME platform.

Sorry Gape I did not read Petr before posting.

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The problem is to cross the 137 GB barrier.

What do you mean ? I have crossed it without problems on very standard hardware it seems.

The 137 GB barrier is caused not by the filesystem (FAT32 in your case), but by the device driver. Standard ESDI506.PDR driver supports standard 28 bit LBA (not 24, it was typo) addressing only, it means 268435456 sectors per 512 bytes = 137438953472 bytes.

I already wrote you that you can be sure that you really crossed the barrier only if you filled the disk beyond it. Did you?

And the problem is in ESDI506.PDR. So you have to check what driver do you use. Go to the device manager and look what files are asociated with your hard disk controller. Is there ESDI506.PDR?

If you still don't believe, please read http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098/EN-US/ e.g.:

Operating systems that do not have 48-bit LBA support enabled by default (such as Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me), or Windows 2000) that are installed on a partition that spans beyond the 28-bit LBA boundary (137GB) will experience data corruption or data loss.

OK?

Petr

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Yuck!

I have some kind of Promise IDE chip on my motherboard. I use via 4-in-1 drivers and run an app called "VIA IDE Miniport driver" (I am not sure what it does exactly but I end up using UltraATA 100 anyway). I use a different PDR file so I think I might not have the bug.

One of my drives is 200 GB. I've seen corruption occur... I can't use certain partitions in DOS, or run scandisk or defrag (not even ME version in Windows) :(

Diskeeper Lite is an OK substitute for defrag.

Is there any safe alternative to scandisk? Or is the only other choice, if a partiton gets corrupted, to just reformat it?

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Petr

As you've seen I've already more or less answered and had the same question to you.

You understand by this that I did not go past the 137 GB limit with data. My C: drive is almost empty and was just about to be partitioned for multibooting in fact.

Yes, of course I use ESDI506.PDR. IOS.VXD is listed as well.

I now fear it is used as well by my 250 GB Serial ATA drive who has 108 GB of data I would hate to loose or spend hours or even days recovering it.

I will forget partitioning C:\ for now. Will now back up my system on another drive and will fill C: with junk until I reach this barrier.

I'll give feedback in a reasonable delay as to what happens.

See ya.

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OK Petr, is there a fix? both my primary & seondary IDE controlers are using ESDI506.PDR, do we have a replacement file from ME,2K,XP we can put in it's place?

You have ASUS A7V400-MX, it means that you should use VIA 4-in-1 drivers probably.

But I'm not sure if everything will work, it has to be tried.

There is a patch of ESDI_506.PDR but it is not free of charge: http://members.aol.com/rloew1/Programs/Patch137.htm

I have no personal experience so I cannot help you further.

Petr

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Petr

As you've seen I've already more or less answered and had the same question to you.

Yes, I have not noticed that there is a new page.

I'd say just be careful, it's easy to lose your data.

Some time ago I discovered how to patch Award BIOSes to break 34GB and 64GB barriers - http://www.ryston.cz/petr/bios/ - but 137GB barrier is worse in its nature. I have no personal experience yet so I don't want to make you sure what is the right way.

Petr

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:realmad:VERY NASTY :realmad:

It copies up to 137 GB and bang all running programs crash and you can't reboot.

This is the worst bug there is in Windows.

It is a f***ing scandal that this has not been fixed by M$.

And they claim their OSes on FAT32 handles 2 TB.

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I have "200" (190) GB drive with about 5 partitions totalling 120 GB, followed by a single 70 GB partition at end.

I think I had corrupted the disk when I did a scandisk on the 70 GB partiton the other day. It wouldn't bootup and when i did "dir" on my normal boot drive it showed random ASCII characters. So scandisk and defrag are no good!

From Win 98 though I use xxcopy to do backups to the 70 GB partition, and it works fine because I do not use the bad pdr file as my hard disk controller.

What is strange is that in DOS I can view the 70 GB partition without a problem. I guess command.com does not have 28-bit ATA limitation??

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