So you can't even get it to boot to a floppy so you could try a compatibility layer?

keenmaster486 wrote:

So you can't even get it to boot to a floppy so you could try a compatibility layer?

Not when the drive is detected. It just freezes when the BIOS tries to access the drive.

I just stumbled across an old thread where someone mentions having the same problem on the same board.

It seems like its just a BIOS bug.

I remembered that I have an iWill RAID66 PCI card so I popped that in and hooked the drive up and it seems to detect it just fine. I don't normally like to use expansion cards for drive controllers, but I guess that's just due to bad memories of an old SIIG one that corrupted a drive.

Am I likely to have any problems just using a PCI card like this? If anything the ATA66 interface should allow the drive to be a bit quicker, being that it is an ATA133 drive.

EDIT: Crap... I guess the card is only reporting the drive as 13GB... *sigh*

Not sure what to do about that. I wish I had an ATA133 card. :p

See if you can limit the capacity of the 80 GB drive. Some of them have a jumper for this or a software tool.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

See if you can limit the capacity of the 80 GB drive. Some of them have a jumper for this or a software tool.

Can you explain how this works? It looks like the Maxtor does have a "clip" jumper setting, but it'd be nice to actually use the full 80GB.

Google the drive numbers and find a datasheet, manual or jumper table. They might be too new to have this jumper.

If you got a Seagate drive you can use SeaTools and set the capacity.

Like I said, it does have the jumper but I'd like to use the full capacity if at all possible.

Okay, I tried my SIIG ATA66 card and it appears to use a similar controller to the iWill one, so it also doesn't see over 13GB.

I remembered having a PCI SATA card around and when I found it I was surprised to see that it appears to be a cheap clone of the Promise ATA133\SATA150 cards that people seem to like around here. I installed it and it does work, but for some reason FDISK (from a Windows 98SE boot floppy) is still seeing the drive as only 13GB! And Windows 98SE setup still warns that it appears that LBA is not enabled.

I don't see any way to get into a configuration utility for this card though. I brief BIOS message pops up showing that it has detected the Maxtor drive but there's no indicator that I can get into a configuration menu.

FDISK can't count over 64 or so GB. So if it reports 13, it might not necessarily be 13. Just something to watch our for with such large drives.

I just tried an 80GB SATA drive and I get basically the same things going on. I've formatted all of these drives as FAT32 on another system, so the FDISK issue doesn't really matter.

This time, I just figured I'd wing it and run setup without scandisk, and then I got a space warning toward the beginning of the installation, but it allowed me to proceed. It looks like it might be working... but I won't really know until I'm in Windows and looking at 70GB+ free space.

I've never had this much trouble getting Windows 98 installed on a hard drive. I used 98SE on my main system up through 2003 and have installed it hundreds of times over the years... though I think the largest drive I'd used on it was a 60GB Maxtor, and that was on a much much newer board (an NF7-S 2.0).

To be honest, this board was always used with a pair of Quantum 13GB drives, which would explain why I never ran into these issues before... 🤣

Yea around 60 gb is the limit for some of the 16 bit tools like fdisk. 120 is the proper limit.

Well, it looks like it works fine using the Promise SATA150 PCI controller. 98SE completely installed and reported ~75GB free on the C drive once I got it past the broken scandisk check.

I wish I would have known that it was simply a false alarm by Scandisk and FDISK, due to incompatibility. Could have saved me a couple hours. 😵

Anyway, I'm installing 98 again on the PATA Maxtor drive I had prepared for this computer (put lots of stuff on the drive, ready to use).

Once this is done, I should be mostly ready to use this system.

It is quite a DOS gaming beast if I do say so.

K6-2 500Mhz AFX (cooled by a Socket A cooler with a quiet 80mm fan)
FIC PA-2013 2.1 with 2MB Cache
256MB PC-100 SDRAM
TNT 2 Pro 16MB AGP (looks OEM, just says nvidia on the PCB)
Labway Yamaha YMF719E-S ISA
Midiman MM401 ISA MPU401 card (to connect to MT-32+MT200 with intelligent mode support)
80GB Maxtor DM+9 ATA133
"Maxtor" Promise SATA150\ATA133 TX2Plus PCI Card
16x DVD-ROM
350W Seasonic 350ET 80Plus Bronze PSU

...

Oy... except the fun never ends for me. I just installed the driver for the SATA150 card and now its sitting at the Windows98 startup screen and the hard drive is making this slight seeking noise every few seconds... wont boot... probably an IRQ conflict. 😵

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I wish I would have known that it was simply a false alarm by Scandisk and FDISK, due to incompatibility. Could have saved me a couple hours. 😵

I know, all part of this weird hobby 🤣

Because I mostly use CF, SD or SATA drives, I "prep" them on my desktop. I use Paragon partition software and create the FAT32 partition right there. Then I copy a folder structure across, which contains Windows 98 installation files, drivers, tools, stuff I always need.

I install Windows 98 so often, I had to come up with a fast process. Some of the larger drives take a long time to partition with FDISK, so there is a lot of time you can make up.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I know, all part of this weird hobby :lol: […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote:

I wish I would have known that it was simply a false alarm by Scandisk and FDISK, due to incompatibility. Could have saved me a couple hours. 😵

I know, all part of this weird hobby 🤣

Because I mostly use CF, SD or SATA drives, I "prep" them on my desktop. I use Paragon partition software and create the FAT32 partition right there. Then I copy a folder structure across, which contains Windows 98 installation files, drivers, tools, stuff I always need.

I install Windows 98 so often, I had to come up with a fast process. Some of the larger drives take a long time to partition with FDISK, so there is a lot of time you can make up.

Yeah, this is exactly what I do. Somehow have not run into this problem before now though. I guess I never bothered using larger drives on such old systems.

I was using this same method when working at a PC repair shop 13 years ago... 😵

Just wanted to mention that the problem I had where the system would freeze while loading Windows, with the hard drive making short access sounds, is now fixed.

I believe it was related to installing drivers out of order. I'd forgotten just how picky these systems were. I attempted to install the TNT2 driver and the ATA133 card driver at the same time... but forgot to first install the VIA 4 in 1 driver.

After messing with it for a while, I disabled just about everything optional in the BIOS (including built in IDE interfaces, VGA IRQ, etc.), entered safemode, "removed" the ATA133 card from device manager, uninstalled the nvidia drivers, rebooted to safe mode again, installed the 4.35 4in1 driver, rebooted, installed an OLDER TNT2 driver (45.23), rebooted, then allowed it to install the ATA133 device\driver again. After rebooting again (and enabling the things I needed in the BIOS), all is well! The system is quite fast for how old it is. Having a much newer hard drive makes these things so much less tedious with all the rebooting. Now I'm actually somewhat tempted to hook up a tiny 16GB SATA SSD I stripped out of a netbook... for some reason. 😁

Latest BIOS is ji4333 something like that