Win 98 and large HDDs

[mubs]

Will win98 seel all of a hard disk larger than 137GB if it (Win98) is installed within the first 8GB? I mean without installing crapola like Ontrack and disk mfrs' special overlay sw. I'm also wondering of DOS based tools like Ghost and DriveImage (when booted off floppy) are able to see beyond 137GB.

MS has little info on this, other than to say no.

The BIOS on the relevant PC supports 48-bit LBA.

As always, thanks for the support!

 

[mubs]

Yikes, I screwed up. The drive will be on a Promise Ultra-100. So if I run Promise's shitty drivers, will I be ok?

 

[jtr1962]

Win 9x and the FAT32 file system is claimed to be able to use drives up to 2TB. I don't think you should have any problems. AFAIK Win9x uses 32 bits for LBA. The remaining 16 will just be padded with zeroes by the controller. Fdisk won't show the size of the drive properly when you partition (although it'll still work). I'm also using a Promise Ultra-100 card which is 48-bit LBA capable, but I have yet to try a drive larger than 137 GB on it. However, some others have tried it and claim it works.

BTW, I don't think drive overlays will help anyway. You need a controller which is 48-bit LBA capable.

 

[mubs]

Thanks jtr. I'm a partition freak (won't tell you how many I have ). The biggest partitions will be 50GB. I use Partition Magic and/or W2k to do all my disk work. W98 is only for reading and occassional writing and image creation.