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Enable48BitLBA | Break the 137Gb barrier!


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I bought a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive, but my HP Vectra VLi 8's BIOS does NOT support 48-bit LBA, so does that mean i can't use ANY part of the disk or just the part after the first 137 gigs? 48bitlba.com's FAQ#1 addresses this question and says that 'data corruption' will ONLY occur if you access data beyond the 137 GB limit. Also, according to the drive's manual, i can use ONLY the first 137 gigs of the disk. However, my problem is this: I do NOT want to make ONE 137 gig partition to install 98SE on. My main question is this: can i make one 20 gig partition to install 98SE on, and make another partition as large as 117 gigs? In other words, can i make partitions of different sizes, granted they are NOT, in total, larger than the 137 GB amount limit? I sure hope so, since even XP was slow for me, when i installed it on a large > 64 gig partition.

In the event i decide i want to "break the 137 Gb barrier" Then, unless somebody knows how i can update my BIOS, i'll have to resort to a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO), according to my drive's manual. Or, could i use Enable48BitLBA withOUT BIOS support for it? I never understood why everyone is against a DDO (i remember using it, way back on my Packard Bell 486 to overcome it's 400 mb HD size limit so i could access my new drive's 850 megs). I don't recall having any issues with it. This page describes the shortcomings or it. The only major problem is dual or multi-booting OS'es. Since i can keep 98SE, i'll probably never need another OS anyway.

Edited by seskanda
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I bought a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive, but my HP Vectra VLi 8's BIOS does NOT support 48-bit LBA

No BIOS update available for that? Otherwise, change the BIOS chip?

My main question is this: can i make one 20 gig partition to install 98SE on, and make another partition as large as 117 gigs? In other words, can i make partitions of different sizes, granted they are NOT, in total, larger than the 137 GB amount limit? I sure hope so, since even XP was slow for me, when i installed it on a large > 64 gig partition.

Yes. You can partition in as many different sized partitions as you like PROVIDED you are sure that not one part of any of them is above the 137GB limit. Get something that will show you exactly where the partitions are when you set them (I use Ranish Partition Manager which works from DOS or I use Gnome Parted on a Live CD or USB stick - either of these allow you to decide exactly where the partitions start and end as do many other programs, but those are both free).

WARNING! Read the HP blurb below about the BIOS limit of 65GB.

Or, could i use Enable48BitLBA withOUT BIOS support for it?

Without the BIOS supporting it, Enable48BitLBA won't work because it can't.

I never understood why everyone is against a DDO

I'm not against it - I know nothing about it! :D

You might want to try this link for HP info about your PC and large HDD:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...jectID=tis09141

which says:

Model:

HP Vectra VLi8 PC

Test: Boot with a large HDD

Boots with a IDE 137 GB HDD but...

Comments - Limitations:

PC will boot with a large HDD (up to 137 GB), but BIOS setup limits HDD maximum capacity to 65 GB.

Bios Update Planed? (yes, that is how hp spell planned lol)

NO

There is also a forum about your computer at hp.com

HP lack of support and their own confusion about what they sell you was the reason I started building my own computers years ago and I'll never buy another box except to get something inside it cheaper than buying the component. Have you thought of upgrading to a more modern motherboard but not so modern it costs more than $30 or $40? I think one of mine cost $17 and runs HDD larger than 137GB!

Hope some of this helps.

Edited by briton
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No BIOS update available for that? Otherwise, change the BIOS chip?
.

Nope. The lastest BIOS update dated (1/17/01) does NOT address it. How can i change the BIOS chip?

Yes. You can partition in as many different sized partitions as you like PROVIDED you are sure that not one part of any of them is above the 137GB limit. Get something that will show you exactly where the partitions are when you set them (I use Ranish Partition Manager which works from DOS or I use Gnome Parted on a Live CD or USB stick - either of these allow you to decide exactly where the partitions start and end as do many other programs, but those are both free).

That's good to know. On another note, i had a Western Digital 120 GB, but it died on me via S.M.A.R.T failure, could it have been caused by the BIOS limitation of 65 GB HD?

Without the BIOS supporting it, Enable48BitLBA won't work because it can't.

Shucks. That's what i thought.

I'm not against it - I know nothing about it!

I may not need a DDO, because the drive's manual says i can insert a "capacity-limiting jumper" on it. Hopefully, this will reduce the drive's max size to 137 GB. I recall the Western Digital was working OK, until the S.M.A.R.T failure, and it's full size was detected in 98SE, even though the BIOS Setup reported it as being 65 GB.

You might want to try this link for HP info about your PC and large HDD:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...jectID=tis09141

which says:

Model:

HP Vectra VLi8 PC

Test: Boot with a large HDD

Boots with a IDE 137 GB HDD but...

Comments - Limitations:

PC will boot with a large HDD (up to 137 GB), but BIOS setup limits HDD maximum capacity to 65 GB.

Bios Update Planed? (yes, that is how hp spell planned lol)

NO

HP lack of support and their own confusion about what they sell you was the reason I started building my own computers years ago and I'll never buy another box except to get something inside it cheaper than buying the component. Have you thought of upgrading to a more modern motherboard but not so modern it costs more than $30 or $40? I think one of mine cost $17 and runs HDD larger than 137GB!

Hope some of this helps.

Thanks for this. It confirms that i can use a HD up to 137 GB, however can i fill it pass 65 GBs? I never had a chance to try this with the Western Digital drive, because of it's S.M.A.R.T errors and eventually failure. When i get around to trying the "capacity-limiting jumper" on the Seagate 300 GB, if it limits the drive to 137 GB, then i'll see if i can use MORE than 65 gigs of the disk. Thankfully, i did NOT buy this Vectra VLi 8, but found it. I also found another mobo, called Napoli 2/2a, but, i believe it also has a 65 GB BIOS HD limitation.

Edited by seskanda
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Nope. The lastest BIOS update dated (1/17/01) does NOT address it. How can i change the BIOS chip?

Sorry, seskanda, I slipped up. When I wrote the first answers, I hadn't yet visited the HP tech support site so my answers further down answered some of my own questions (BIOS update not "planed" included lol).

Well, to change a BIOS chip, you buy a new one, pull the old one (using chip extractor) and insert the new one. To be honest, you would do better to find a replacement mobo and it's probably a lot cheaper!

Yes. You can partition in as many different sized partitions as you like PROVIDED you are sure that not one part of any of them is above the 137GB limit.

That's good to know. On another note, i had a Western Digital 120 GB, but it died on me via S.M.A.R.T failure, could it have been caused by the BIOS limitation of 65 GB HD?

Once again, I should have edited my first answer once I realised that HP were limiting to 65GB. If I read their limit correctly, it makes no sense "You can have whatever size hard disk you like, provided you only use 65GB of it"!!!! So I assume that the partitions have to stay within THAT limit which means that you are STRONGLY advised to dump that mobo!

To answer your question, no, S.M.A.R.T. doesn't work like that. Without checking on your particular HD manufacturer's blurb, S.M.A.R.T. primarily predicts failures by having feedback within the drive regarding the mechanical wear. The manufacturers' tests tell them what wears at what rate under normal use and they then fit the hardware with monitors which feed back the state and sometimes the rate of change of the wear. On top of that, I understand that some manufacturers include some data checking. But unless they changed the way they do things, they aren't interested in partitions etc because S.M.A.R.T. is looking at the disk itself.

I may not need a DDO, because the drive's manual says i can insert a "capacity-limiting jumper" on it. Hopefully, this will reduce the drive's max size to 137 GB.

But HP are saying you can't use it past 65GB.

I recall the Western Digital was working OK, until the S.M.A.R.T failure, and it's full size was detected in 98SE, even though the BIOS Setup reported it as being 65 GB.

Well, the S.M.A.R.T. "failure" may not be a failure. It depends on what kind of "failure" it was. S.M.A.R.T. predicts failure and if the wear or the errors S.M.A.R.T. is picking up allow, S.M.A.R.T. will stop you using the disk. Before you junk the "failed" HD, make sure of two things: (1) The S.M.A.R.T. report should tell you what you have - maybe you have data which you can recover without paying some expensive data recovery outfit! (2) If you put the HD in another PC which CAN take that size of HD and then, before booting that PC any other way, boot into a WD diagnostic program diskette/CD (is that Lifeguard? I can't remember) and check your HD out!

Thanks for this. It confirms that i can use a HD up to 137 GB, however can i fill it pass 65 GBs? I never had a chance to try this with the Western Digital drive, because of it's S.M.A.R.T errors and eventually failure. When i get around to trying the "capacity-limiting jumper" on the Seagate 300 GB, if it limits the drive to 137 GB, then i'll see if i can use MORE than 65 gigs of the disk. Thankfully, i did NOT buy this Vectra VLi 8, but found it. I also found another mobo, called Napoli 2/2a, but, i believe it also has a 65 GB BIOS HD limitation.

Past 65GB? According to that HP support site, no. If the BIOS limits you to 65GB, then presumably that means you can't actually get past that point meaning that everything you do will show that drive as having only 65GB in which case you don't need to jumper it do you?

I am not really clear why you have a 300GB HDD, but you don't throw together a PC to use it! Not being critical, but at random I just hit a barebones system which would take the drive - $129 plus s&h. Why bother with the old mobos? Buy or build a new box - you have an OS or you wouldn't be on a Win98SE site! You have a case/power supply (the HP site doesn't say what form factor - if it isn't full-size ATX I would recommend you get a box with some space but they come cheap) etc etc

The 137GB limit we are talking about on this forum is something Windows 98SE has in the OS itself. Unless you do the Enable48bitLBA mod, if you don't force Windows to run disk access in real/compatibility mode, either Windows won't actually boot (my case when I installed the Win98SE partition starting above the 137GB limit) or you get wraparound errors when the OS attempts to write above the 137GB limit (which is a disaster because the user will never know until the data has been trashed with totally unpredictable results). Before the ESDI_506.PDR file was modded (Enable48bitLBA and Loew versions), you could still use the >137GB HDD provided you set Real Mode (using MSCONFIG from Safe Mode being the easy way).

If you are going to use that 300GB as a 65GB drive, can I swap a 80GB drive for it? lol Just kidding. Hope you get it solved.

Edited by briton
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You may try to search (or ask) in Wim's BIOS forums about a solution to your BIOS problem, but I agree the best solution would be to dump the mobo (together with the case, as I know HP likes proprietary formats as much as other OEMs do) and get yourself some cheap and 48bit LBA-compatible mobo plus a new case.

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My old HP Pavilion 4430 is like that. If I put any hard drive in there that's over 65GB the bios will only report 65GB as the size. FDISK and format will format to larger sizes and Windows will recognize and use it. However performance is sluggish and file moving operations will slowdown, freeze, fail, etc.

I once used a 60GB Maxtor drive in there with no problems. Note that even if I put a single partition smaller than 60GB in, let's say, an 80GB drive, the system had the same problems. Only a hard drive smaller than 60GB did not have these problems.

I think it's both a hardware and bios problem. This is a SiS5598 board used with an AMD K6-2/366 processor. It came with the 300MHz variety but I upgraded to the 366 and set the jumpers correctly. Note also that putting the maximum 256MB of memory (2 sticks of 128MB 66MHz Crucial SDRAM unbuffered) did not help as far as solving the big hard drive problem, so it's not a memory thing either.

This system also did not function well with more than one cdrom drive. And DVD playback was full of hesitation and unsynched video/audio. The optimum is just one CD/RW drive and one hard drive less than 60GB. Just forget about DVD as I tried it with both a Voodoo 3000 PCI and a GeForce 2 MX400 PCI. Same sluggish playback. So I just used a CDRW drive instead and lived without DVD. VCD's played perfectly though!

When used with a 3dfx Voodoo 3000 PCI replacing the on board SiS5598 Video and noting the above limits, it was pretty nice! The HP/Riptide Audio/Modem HCF card gave me awesome 2 channel sound, dos game play, pretty good Windows game play, and dialup modem. I did need to force ACPI by running setup /p j in order to avoid losing USB detection if adding a videocard. Only with ACPI enabled did the USB detect attached devices once a videocard was added. HP had Windows setup with ACPI using Windows 98 Gold, even though using a normal Windows cd without that /p j switch would only install Standard PC. I actually had a tech replace the motherboard before figuring this out but the new board exhibited the same USB problem unless Windows was forced to use ACPI. The ports showed as working properly but no device would be detected.

This motherboard was useless for using a real SB16 card as the ISA ports would not output sound, although an ISA modemblaster provided good modem use when I replaced the Riptide with a SoundBlaster Live PCI soundcard. So the choice at the time was either the Riptide PCI dos game solution or the SoundBlaster Live version of the PCI emulation but a real ISA SoundBlaster would not work.

I've used four of these motherboards and the ISA ports would not produce audio even though players, the device manager, etc all thought everything was working fine. Just no sound is sent to speakers. The same ISA cards worked on other motherboards so the problem was the ISA ports on this motherboard and not in the drivers. Windows thought everything was working great and WMP, games, audio software would think the sound was playing. Just couldn't hear anything! PCI audio worked perfectly and so was the only way to go.

So, is it worth it to use this type of board today? No way. It's from just after the Dos heyday (around 1999) but is useless for real ISA dos gaming. Other boards from that period are nice to setup for old gaming like this. But even that is questionable as Dosbox has advanced to the point where it does dos gaming better than MS-DOS ever did.

So why bother? Just use a modern computer with all its advantages and setup things on it to play your old software.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Please note that if you have a standard Windows98SE installation and it is not on an IBM laptop you should not use the 2226 version of the file but use the 2225 version instead.

You should ONLY use the 2226 version if the ESDI_506.PDR file installed with Windows actually has the version number ending 2226.

(Answering my own question here lol)

Edited by briton
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  • 3 months later...

Thanks LLXX and everyone who contributed. The version 4.10.2225F works fine on my Win 98SE box.

My PC's mobo is a Soltek SL-75FRN2L with an AMD 2000XP + nVidia nForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset. It's using LLXX's ESDI_506.pdf in c:\windows\system\iosubsys on both IDE channels.

I've got a Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda 320G as the second disk drive, fdisked into 3 100GB partitions.

First I filled up the partition 1, ran SFV32 v0.3a - (SimpleFileValidate) to make the CRC of the files,

filled up the 2nd partition, ran SFV32 on those files, then filled up the 3rd partition and then CRC'ed those files.

Then I reran SFV32 on all the partitions and compared the CRCs generated now and before and they all matched up fine - indicating no data corruption.

I have turned off scandskw and scandisk.exe to prevent self-corruption and then use a 3rd party disk checker such as norton dd and the partitions checked out fine.

Previously whenever copy files past the 137GB mark, my first partition would get all corrupted. But luckily the data on that drive is re-creatable :-( until I found out about 48bit LBA and this wonderful thread.

Thanks...LLXX again and everyone...

Oh has anyone found out or is it my imagination that version 2225F looks a bit slower than the original 98SE 2222 (no-mod)?

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hello everybody,

i want to run a seagate 320gb in full capacity on my win98se (4.10.2222A),

so i did first of all the German Q243450 esdi_506.pdr patch

(win98se still stays .2222A, only the esdi_506.pdr goes .2225, is that right?),

but now i´m not sure what´s next..

to go in dos and overwrite this file with LLXX's esdi_506.pdr patch ? (which one of LLXX´s patches exactly ?)

will this enable 48bit lba on my board (asus p3b-f, rev 1004) and also show the possibility of full capacity in the bios,

altough the board originally doesn´t support 48bit lba, and even a bios-update wouldn´t allow this ?

sorry for being a little bit analog,

but im curious to solve this action,

let me know if you can help me!

Edited by mobtik
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but now i´m not sure what´s next..

to go in dos and overwrite this file with LLXX's esdi_506.pdr patch ? (which one of LLXX´s patches exactly ?)

will this enable 48bit lba on my board (asus p3b-f, rev 1004) and also show the possibility of full capacity in the bios,

altough the board originally doesn´t support 48bit lba, and even a bios-update wouldn´t allow this ?

sorry for being a little bit analog,

but im curious to solve this action,

let me know if you can help me!

Yes. Not on the board - on the Operating System. Do not attempt anything above 128GB before you replace the esdi file. The capacity of the BIOS is something else again - unless your BIOS can identify the disk correctly, you are in trouble. Get a BIOS update or else get another board.

The easiest way to get Win98SE working is rather easier than all this - use the excellent Aut-Patcher at AutoPatcher which includes the 48butLBA patch. The only reason you wouldn't be able to use that would be either (a) you are installing the Win98SE OS onto a partition which starts near or over the limit or (B) you need to access that part of the disk before you finish installing and auto-patching.

If you don't want to use the Auto-Patch for some reason (although I don't know why not as it gives you complete choice on what you let it do and allows undoing anything), just manually replace the ESDI file in DOS and carry on.

But without BIOS ability to identify your disk, you are spinning your wheels. Sorry :(

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have written a set of Programs that add to or replace the BIOS Hard Disk Drivers, providing 48-Bit LBA Support. If your BIOS does not support 48-Bit LBA and a BIOS update is not available, one of these programs will provide the necessary support. Although designed to work with my High Capacity Disk Patch, they will work with the LLXX files.

Rudolph Loew

rloew@hotmail.com

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I have written a set of Programs that add to or replace the BIOS Hard Disk Drivers, providing 48-Bit LBA Support. If your BIOS does not support 48-Bit LBA and a BIOS update is not available, one of these programs will provide the necessary support. Although designed to work with my High Capacity Disk Patch, they will work with the LLXX files.

Rudolph Loew

rloew@hotmail.com

Nice to see you are still modifying vxds etc, I notice on your web page your ram limitation patch can you tell me what is the maximum size ram you have been able to use via it.

All the best

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  • 3 weeks later...

Earlier this year there was an exchange between Briton and Seskanda about limits to HDD size, including those imposed by the BIOS. [Around about post #273 on page 14]

It is of course the case that one only reads information like this, and is alerted to the problem AFTER a major data loss! My story is that one of the boxes that I run is a Compaq Deskpro EN 733 SFF. When I hurriedly fitted a 160MB Seagate drive into it plenty of months ago, it ended up requiring the use of the translation feature on the CD that came with the drive, and put the OnTrack address translation routine in place. Windows 98 duly limited the use of the drive to the bottom 137GB and all was well.

On learning that Autopatcher for Windows 98SE had installed the 48BitLBA patch, I thought I would have a try. Promptly put a new primary partition in the free space at the top of the disk, and filled it up with copies of files, on the principle that if I lost this new partition, I would have nothing to cry over. Initially it seemed to be OK, but a reboot later and I had lost the entire contents of the new partition, the entire contents of the extended partition, and the initial primary partition was corrupted beyond repair. Oh dear! All 120 GB on that disk are now in bit heaven.

Having learned the hard way, could I plead for a bigger warning that this patch does not play nice with any other form of disk address translation program? And possibly for Autopatcher 98SE to ask for positive confirmation before it installs it?

I know now, but it would be nice if I were the last to find out unexpectedly!

Thanks

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