Jump to content

Enable48BitLBA | Break the 137Gb barrier!


Recommended Posts

You did install Windows 98 on the first partition (C:) didn't you?

If Win98 is installed on C: drive (formatted to FAT32) and it is less than 137GB there should not be a problem. And since Win98 can't access NTFS you have basically put the rest of the hard disk off limits to the Operating System.

Could be a bad install of Win98 / drivers etc? Maybe you need to re-install Windows 98 again.

You can do that then repair the XP Boot loader with your choice of operating systems

OPTION 1

# Using the boot disk/CD, boot the system into the Command Prompt with CDROM Support.

# Proceed to install Windows 9x from your CD-ROM drive. Insert the CD into the drive and enter the following commands

1. E: (Changes to your CD-ROM Drive, substitute E for the drive if it is something else)

2. CD\SETUP (Change to your Windows 9x Setup folder, ignore if the SETUP.EXE is in the root folder. Substitute SETUP with the folder name of Win9x if SETUP.EXE exists on a different folder)

3. SETUP (Starts the Win9x installation program)

4. Make sure you choose Custom Install and specify the installation folder as D:\WINDOWS (assuming D is your Win9x partition). Follow the normal installation routine and install Win9x.

FIXING XP's boot loader

This step may not be required. Check to see if there is a menu when you start your computer. If there is, you have successfully installed Windows 98, and a menu has already been created. To make it such that Windows XP boots by default, select the XP Boot option, login into admin account, right click on "My Computer", Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery Settings and set the default operating system as Windows XP.

1. You will realise that Windows XP cannot be booted up now. Insert your Windows XP CD and restart your system. You should see a prompt "Press any key to boot from CD.." asking to you press a key to enter Setup. Do so.

2. Choose the Repair option. Never do a complete reinstallation.

3. Select the original drive that Windows XP usually boots to (usually C:)

4. Login as an administrator account

5. At the command prompt, type FIXMBR C:

6. Then type FIXBOOT C:

7. If any confirmation appears, answer yes.

8. Type exit and restart your system.

9. Windows XP would have created a menu for you to choose from booting Windows 98 and XP every time you boot up your PC.

OPTION 2

1) Create a Win98 Startup Disk

2) Create a Notepad file with the following entries, exactly as shown:

L 100 2 0 1

N C:\BOOTSECT.DOS

R BX

0

R CX

200

W

Q

3) Save the file to the Win98/Me Startup Disk as READ.SCR

4) Boot with the Win98 Startup Disk and at the A: prompt type

DEBUG <READ.SCR

Steps 1 - 4 create the BOOTSECT.DOS file needed to boot Win98. You may need to use the ATTRIB C:\BOOTSECT.DOS -S -H -R command if BOOTSECT.DOS already exists and you get an error when trying to recreate it.

5) Configure your computer to boot from the CD drive. This is done in the BIOS, or your computer may offer the option at startup if it detects a bootable CD. If your computer does not support booting from CD-Rom, you should also be able to boot with a 98 Startup disk, and run WINNT.EXE from the I386 folder of your XP CD.

6) Insert your XP CD and boot from it.

7) You'll see some files being copied, then you'll be presented with a choice of installing or

repairing an existing installation. Choose Repair.

8) You'll be asked which XP installation you want to log into. Enter 1. There is usually only

one installation.

9) You'll be prompted for the Administrator password. For Home, the default password is blank, so just hit Enter. For Pro, enter the same password you did during setup for the Administrator account (this is not the same as the password for an Admin level account. It must be the Administrator account password).

10) At the C:\Windows prompt, type FIXBOOT. You'll be prompted to confirm. Do so.

11) When FIXBOOT is finished, remove the XP CD and type EXIT and the machine will reboot.

Reconfigure your computer to boot from the hard drive if necessary.

You will now get the XP Boot loader with your choice of operating systems

Edited by galahs
Link to comment
Share on other sites


If Win98 is installed on C: drive (formatted to FAT32) and it is less than 137GB there should not be a problem.

That's not necessarily true. The 320 GB drive is divided in 1*10GB, and 6*50 GB, I presume. This means that there's a linked list of extended partition tables, which are partly located beyond the 137 GB barrier. At boot W98 is following these links, to see if there are supported partitions in the list. When reading an extended partition table beyond 137GB, it will read (semi) random data, which can cause problems.

I'd suggest to just install LLXX's patch. If it doesn't help it will not hurt either. You can do the patching from XP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd also recommend installing LLXX's patch.

I didn't think DOS or Win98?me could even see the NTFS partitions, so why would it affect it? Its only when data has to be written or read from those sections that a problem occurs.

I used to recommend to clients who needed Windows 98 but could only purchase/or already had larger hard disks, that a way around the problem was to only create partitions up to the 120GB and just leave the rest of the disk un-partitioned. Seemed to work fine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If everything beyond 128 GB is left blank, it will work fine. It will also work fine when you create one big NTFS partition in the remaining space, since W98 indeed will not touch it.

In this case a problem can rise. DaveLH seems to have 7 partitions. That could be 3 primary and 3 logical, but more likely is 1 or 2 primary and 5 or six logical. I've seen several partition managers which create these logical partitions as a linked list. (Maybe all do so).

The primary partiton table defines a 10 GB partition 1, starting at 0, and an extended partition 2 (which is a partition table itself), starting at 10 GB.

Extended partition 2 defines a 50 GB logical partition 3 starting at 10 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 4, starting at 60 GB plus a little.

Extended partition 4 defines a 50 GB logical partition 5 starting at 60 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 6, starting at 110 GB plus a little.

Extended partition 6 defines a 50 GB logical partition 7 starting at 110 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 8, starting at 160 GB plus a little.

...

W98 has to check all extended partitions, to see if they define a logical FAT partition, but when reading extended partition 8, it will read the data what happens to be at address (160 mod 137) ~ 23 GB. This may or may not look like a partition table. Both cases are bad, and can damage the W98 memory structures.

To safely use an unpatched W98 system on a huge IDE disk, al partitions used by W98 and all partition tables have to be below 137 GB.

Edited by Mijzelf
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even a Patched Windows 9X System is not safe if the BIOS does not support 48-Bit LBA. During Startup, Windows 9X uses DOS and the BIOS to load software and update system files (WININIT). It also uses the BIOS in Safe Mode or Compatability mode. Windows XP and Vista also have to use the BIOS to load their Kernels and Disk Drivers during Startup. This leaves a window of vulnerability in which any Writes to the higher partitions could corrupt data in the lower ones.

Since the damage could be just a few bytes, as occurs when Windows XP tags an extended partition table entry, the damage may not be obvious

Neither LLXX's Patches nor my High Capacity Disk Patch solve this problem. I wrote a separate package called BOOTMAN for my customers to provide an overlay to the BIOS to provide the necessary support.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree - apply the patch. You might want to wipe the 98 partition and reinstall it afterwards in case.

You are ensuring that you can't access the other partitions when you install Win98, right? One thing you might consider is using a boot manager which can hide everything else when you boot into 98 and ensuring that the other partitions simply don't exist when you install 98 (use Ranish Partition Manager or something similar to "remove" the partitions from the table and put them back after you have installed 98 then change the boot manager settings to ensure they are hidden whenever you boot into 98).

Oh and you aren't using dynamic disks in XP, right?

Hope you sort it out, DaveLH, and please come back and let us know when you do and how you did it!

Edited by briton
Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a proof, take a look on the screenshot I made a few minutes ago...

post-159644-1195923210_thumb.jpg

The average copy speed I calculated is 20.854 MB/s (SATA => SATA) B)

Way to go Lecco. Glad you found it. But what exactly is that dialog in the screenshot showing us? Sorry to be ignorant, but I can't pick out the clue.

Edited by briton
Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a proof, take a look on the screenshot I made a few minutes ago...

post-159644-1195923210_thumb.jpg

The average copy speed I calculated is 20.854 MB/s (SATA => SATA) B)

Way to go Lecco. Glad you found it. But what exactly is that dialog in the screenshot showing us? Sorry to be ignorant, but I can't pick out the clue.

No, youre not an ignnorant. ;) In the lower left corner, there is the copying speed in kB/s. I thought you are familiar with Totalcopy. :whistle:

Edited by Lecco
Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing you might consider is using a boot manager which can hide everything else when you boot into 98

That doesn't help. The mechanism used to hide a partition is to set the 'hidden' bit in the partition descriptor. So W98 still has to parse the partitiontables to see if it should ignore the particular partition, which it already does, since W98 ignores all unknown partition types.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing you might consider is using a boot manager which can hide everything else when you boot into 98

That doesn't help. The mechanism used to hide a partition is to set the 'hidden' bit in the partition descriptor. So W98 still has to parse the partitiontables to see if it should ignore the particular partition, which it already does, since W98 ignores all unknown partition types.

OK, but that doesn't apply if you edit the partition table manually and actually DELETE all other partitions except the one on which you are going to install Win98. In that case, the partition table only includes that partition - the rest of the space is seen as unpartitioned EMPTY (or available) space by the Win98 installer and by Win98 when it boots. Once you have successfully installed Win98, you go back to the partition table and manually enter the partition information which was there before you "deleted" them. You don't lose data because the data in the partitions themselves still exists. It was a method by which some RPM users used to have more than 4 primary partitions - they simply deleted the partition table info for the ones they weren't using at the time. Of course, during the time that the partition table information has been deleted, you must NOT use any utilities which will try to use that space and of course you need to have recorded the partition table parameters so that you can put them back in the table.

Just an idea to find out what was going wrong.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi,

I just bought big SATA HDD WD 500GB. I set "IDE/combined" mode in SETUP (chipset: i945G+ICH7R) to operate 2 SATA ports like standard IDE channel (PATA have attached CDW+DVDW, SATA - HDD). I made here 1 FAT16 and 2 FAT32 (192GB) partitions. It's well accessible from DOS 7.1 but I can access only 1st FAT32 from Win98se. So I installed LBA48 patch (~100kB self-installation exe which should replace ESDI_506.PDR)

The problem is a BSOD I got on next boot (translated from CZ):

"Bad call of dynamic connection of VxD ESDI_506.PDR(03) + 000017EB to device 0026 service A. And ask if I want to continue".

When I continue it boot OK and even LBA48 works - I can access all partitions. But I got this nasty BSOD on every startup. Is there some alternative and fully working LBA48 patch?

Another question to SATA - why Win98SE cannot work with IDE/enhanced mode (1 PATA channel + 4 SATA ports?). In DOS 7.1 it works but Win98SE hangs during boot but works in safe mode. It's not too important now I can live with combined mode.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ xrayer : I also have a 500GB SATA harddrive from WD a dont get any BSOD. Maybe its the problem wih i945 chipset, I have only i865PE. But I have also the issue with IDE/combined mode (called compatible in my BIOS). I can only use 2 channels - IDE+IDE or IDE+SATA, if I use enhanced mode, Windows hangs during bootup. I dont know where the problem is, but as I replaced my old 120 + 80 GB drives with a 500GB one, I no longer need to think about it. :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ xrayer : I also have a 500GB SATA harddrive from WD a dont get any BSOD. Maybe its the problem wih i945 chipset, I have only i865PE. But I have also the issue with IDE/combined mode (called compatible in my BIOS). I can only use 2 channels - IDE+IDE or IDE+SATA, if I use enhanced mode, Windows hangs during bootup. I dont know where the problem is, but as I replaced my old 120 + 80 GB drives with a 500GB one, I no longer need to think about it. :D

I don't know exact driver version because I was installing new mobo during weekend and no network working yet and had some ?? ver. So I downloaded latest version from here and try it when back at home. I also readed from other users that enhanced mode doesn't work. BTW I use 2nd PATA HDD with Kouwell IDE/SATA adapter and is seems to be perfectly transparent to the system.

You say you have 865 chipset, then you wouldn't need this patch because of intel application accelerator should provide own LBA48 bit enabled driver for you if you installed it. Maybe it would be possible to patch intel's driver to force it work on ICH7 too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know exact driver version because I was installing new mobo during weekend and no network working yet and had some ?? ver. So I downloaded latest version from here and try it when back at home. I also readed from other users that enhanced mode doesn't work. BTW I use 2nd PATA HDD with Kouwell IDE/SATA adapter and is seems to be perfectly transparent to the system.

I can send you the INFs I use, just send me a PM with your mail or ICQ. ;) External SATA/PATA controllers do always work. ;)

You say you have 865 chipset, then you wouldn't need this patch because of intel application accelerator should provide own LBA48 bit enabled driver for you if you installed it. Maybe it would be possible to patch intel's driver to force it work on ICH7 too.

IAA doesnt work od 856PE chipset, look here. ;)

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...