Jump to content

Enable48BitLBA | Break the 137Gb barrier!


Recommended Posts

Is this sufficient? :)

I filled, rebooted Windows, and then scandisked each partition with no errors of any kind.

C: is not filled enough

-_-

And regarding licenses etc. M$ has completely dropped support for 9x/ME and not even making any profits from it so there is no harm done at all from downloading 9x/ME.

Microsoft should have made both Windows 98SE and Windows ME free upgrades to Windows 98 I think, like you have SP1 and SP2 as free upgrades to Windows XP.

I think we can distribute these Windows ME files now to work around some Windows 98 problems, as far as we don't ditribute complete Windows iso's

Maybe we can get MS to support 9x if we can write the WGA validation and Notification tools for 9x? :P:P:P
Link to comment
Share on other sites


And regarding licenses etc. M$ has completely dropped support for 9x/ME and not even making any profits from it so there is no harm done at all from downloading 9x/ME.

With all regards due to you, please refrain with such senseless (and dangerous) statements.

A user who sticks to 98SE/ME is someone who does not buy XP or Vista.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree that lack of support for 98/me doesnt mean its free.all oses even win95 require you to have a valid key reguardless of age but on the other hand if a 3rd party application improves a os is it ilegal?does it urk Ms when someone prolonges the life of a unsupported os?If theres no money changing hands does microsoft care other then the money lost in not upgrading to xp.telling me constantly that 9x is unsecure on the net doesnt scare me at all in fact i couldnt care aless if i get a virus i reinstall via ghost etc and all my apps are on cd including updates etc.I think these enchancements like 48bitlba and sp2 are fantastic and i hail their creators .Im forever fixing pcs for older family and friends who just wantta surf check email im and all the stuff comming out of the 98 forum is a godsend no sense arguing over 9x vs nt u cant strong arm grandma into luna she wont bend.lol.

Edited by Randy_Rivers
Link to comment
Share on other sites

C: is not filled enough

-_-

Is the wrapping bug dependant on the size of combined data on all partitions or is it instead dependant on data being filled after the 128 GB point on the first partition(s), regardless if that first 128 GB is completely filled?

Or to put it simply...

Is it the > 128 GB partition size or > 128 GB data size that triggers the bug, once data is written after that point?

I feel this is an important point to clarify, thanks.

Edited by bacon_boy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is it the > 128 GB partition size or > 128 GB data size that triggers the bug, once data is written after that point?

The bug is triggered when both the sector with address n and the sector with address n+128GiB is written.

Old LBA is 28-bit and can address 128 GiB only, it means that if you try to write address on position 128GiB + 1, the first sector of the HDD is written.

This behavior is not related to partition size or data size, but if you have the first partition 128 GiB, then even few bytes in the beginning of the second partition can overwrite some data in the second partition.

And what may happen? It depends on the fact what you will overwrite. If partition tavble, boot records, file allocation tables or directory entries are overwritten, then the HDD may become unaccessible or scandisk can find the errors. But if just some data are overwritten, scandisk will show no error and the only possibility to detect is to compare original and copied files.

Petr

Edited by Petr
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is it the > 128 GB partition size or > 128 GB data size that triggers the bug, once data is written after that point?

The bug is triggered when both the sector with address n and the sector with address n+128GiB is written.

Old LBA is 28-bit and can address 128 GiB only, it means that if you try to write address on position 128GiB + 1, the first sector of the HDD is written.

This behavior is not related to partition size or data size, but if you have the first partition 128 GiB, then even few bytes in the beginning of the second partition can overwrite some data in the second partition.

And what may happen? It depends on the fact what you will overwrite. If partition tavble, boot records, file allocation tables or directory entries are overwritten, then the HDD may become unaccessible or scandisk can find the errors. But if just some data are overwritten, scandisk will show no error and the only possibility to detect is to compare original and copied files.

Petr

Thanks for clarifying. This means my last test would have been sufficient.

In any event, I have now filled the entire drive and rebooted/scandisked. It's quite apparent that this fix works exactly as intended.

I hope no one asks me to keep filling it :D

post-111760-1159821045_thumb.png

Edited by bacon_boy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

And regarding licenses etc. M$ has completely dropped support for 9x/ME and not even making any profits from it so there is no harm done at all from downloading 9x/ME.
With all regards due to you, please refrain with such senseless (and dangerous) statements.

A user who sticks to 98SE/ME is someone who does not buy XP or Vista.

Not necessarily, I know a few other people [besides myself] that use 98SE and XP in dual-boot setups, and [like myself] own legal licenses for all their M$ OSes.

On the other hand, use of certain OS files by people who don't own a particular OS license, is debatable.

IMHO:

From what I've seen, use of isolated files that fix problems with your [legally owned] OS should theoretically be ok, but then again, I haven't read all types of M$ EULA, so I could be wrong.

HTH

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What's the BIOS version and date?

You should try using a newer version of Free FDISK, or the Windows ME FDISK that can be found somewhere in this thread.

My bios is Award Modular Bios v4.51PG on an Asus P2B-LS mobo. I have the 1014 Beta 003 bios patch installed. Works fine but doesn't include 48bitLBA. There seems to be a commercial upgrade to version 6.00 or something but I think it's not necessary (see below).

I guess that the missing bios support is why just about all partitioning tools don't work. I've tried Free FDISK, SuperFdisk and some other mentioned in this thread. At best they showed big partitions correctly but they were not able to create them. None of them showed the harddisk size correctly.

Anyway, I've installed the patch and tools from the BigHDD2.0 setup from post #56 (on my system drive which is small and scsi, so no problems there). Then used a Knoppix CD (live linux booting from cdrom) to create partitions on the 250GB Samsung disk (model SP2514N) and create a FAT32 filesystem in them.

After some experiments I found why windows sometimes shows two driveletters for the same partition, one formatted and one seemingly unformatted. It turns out that windows likes just about any set of partitions as long as there are no primary partitions that start above the 128GiB limit.

Extended/logical partitions can start anywhere, primaries that start below the limit can stretch across the limit and be bigger that 128GiB. For any primary starting beyond the limit windows will show a ghost driveletter.

With that sorted I filled the drive (then one big primary partition) to the rim by copying some big files over and over again. There was no corruption at all. All data verified 100%.

The copying was done partly by the normal explorer copy&paste functions, partly by an ancient version of FileSync and partly with xcopy calls in a batch file. No problems with any of them. :)

Note that I haven't tried any copying in dosmode!

So, once again thanx to LLXX for developing the patch!!!

If anybody wants some input on how to partition/format with linux, let me know. It's just a few (relatively) simple commands but I don't want to fill this thread with off-topic info if nobody is interested.

p.s. Scandskw and defrag from the BigHDD2.0 install work fine where the originals wouldn't even start because the disk was too big for them. To avoid problems I've disabled (renamed) all older versions of scandskw, defrag and don't forget chkdsk. Hopefully that will prevent windows from messing things up on a boot-time scan after a bad shutdown.

Edited by emanymmud
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My bios is Award Modular Bios v4.51PG on an Asus P2B-LS mobo. I have the 1014 Beta 003 bios patch installed. Works fine but doesn't include 48bitLBA. There seems to be a commercial upgrade to version 6.00 or something but I think it's not necessary (see below).

What was your BIOS setup for this disk? My experience is that it is necessary to set it to "NONE" but then there is problem with the transfer speed because the IDE disk controller (PIIX4 in this case) is not programmed correctly.

Have you tried to test the transfer speed, for example by HDTach 2.7? The transfer speed should be around 30 MB/s.

Petr

Link to comment
Share on other sites

but isnt the bad shutdown scan with the dos scandisk which doesnt have any problems.

I'm no expert in this field, but I suspect that the dos version (I'm not sure which version is used during a bad-shutdown scan) is more likely to depend on the bios than the windows version.

However, the bad-shutdown scan used to be able to scan the drive whereas the windows version complained about having too little memory. So you might be right afterall.

My bios is Award Modular Bios v4.51PG on an Asus P2B-LS mobo. I have the 1014 Beta 003 bios patch installed. Works fine but doesn't include 48bitLBA. There seems to be a commercial upgrade to version 6.00 or something but I think it's not necessary (see below).

What was your BIOS setup for this disk? My experience is that it is necessary to set it to "NONE" but then there is problem with the transfer speed because the IDE disk controller (PIIX4 in this case) is not programmed correctly.

Have you tried to test the transfer speed, for example by HDTach 2.7? The transfer speed should be around 30 MB/s.

Petr

As far as I know I have the disk set to auto and LBA (normal is for smaller disks and "large" is a seldom used setting, at least that's what I read somewhere).

I tested the disk by copying files generated by h2test, a small tool that came with a computer magazine over here. It writes pseudo-random data into a bunch of files and can read it back and verify that it's correct. This read back and verify processed the data at about 15MB/s (the P2 400MHz could be a bottleneck).

I'll check out that HdTach tool and get back when I have some numbers.

CORRECTION

The disk is set to AUTO mode in the bios, not LBA.

The website of HdTach mentions that it's going to install lowlevel drivers. Since my system is working correctly now I don't want to risk messing it up. Another benchmark (h2bench for those who read c't magazine) showed read speeds of around 9MB/s in dos mode.

I'm happy with it since I bought the drive for size, not speed.

Edited by emanymmud
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4.51PG does not support 48-bit LBA so you may encounter many problems working in DOS mode. You may be able to upgrade to a custom build of 6.00PG but unless you have a separate BIOS flasher it is very risky and not recommended.

9MB/s, that's decent...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And regarding licenses etc. M$ has completely dropped support for 9x/ME and not even making any profits from it so there is no harm done at all from downloading 9x/ME.
With all regards due to you, please refrain with such senseless (and dangerous) statements.

A user who sticks to 98SE/ME is someone who does not buy XP or Vista.

Not necessarily, I know a few other people [besides myself] that use 98SE and XP in dual-boot setups, and [like myself] own legal licenses for all their M$ OSes.

On the other hand, use of certain OS files by people who don't own a particular OS license, is debatable.

IMHO:

From what I've seen, use of isolated files that fix problems with your [legally owned] OS should theoretically be ok, but then again, I haven't read all types of M$ EULA, so I could be wrong.

HTH

You are right MDGx. But my point was rather adressing the inflation of posts lately saying that, as MS does not support the 9x OSes anymore, everything is permitted, including redistributing the entire setup files to anyone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are right MDGx. But my point was rather adressing the inflation of posts lately saying that, as MS does not support the 9x OSes anymore, everything is permitted, including redistributing the entire setup files to anyone.
You're right, as long as M$ doesn't post the source code or releases these OSes as open source [or similar], nobody should treat them as such.

M$ files are still copyrighted + trademarked. :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...