did You restart after partitioning? did You try overwriting the beginning of the disk with random? did You try formatting with mkfs?

I have had success using an IDE to USB adapter and formatting the hard drives on my modern computer. I then just plug them into the DOS computer and everything works fine.

I know I could format this stuff on another computer or another OS on this one, but I'm trying to figure out what is going wrong here. I know I was using a 13GB disk for Win98SE back in 1999, so it's not like this size is impossible.

Have been messing around a bit more and it looks like it's a 1024 cylinder limit issue. As long as I keep the boot partition below cylinder 1024 it works, as soon as it goes above it, DOS 7.1 / Windows 98SE lose it and fail to recognise any partitioning at all. The 1024 cylinder issue is well-known, but should only affect DOS 7.0 and lower, not 7.1/Win98.

For now I've gotten it to work by using a 5GB primary partition instead of a 6GB one, but I'd still like to understand why this behaviour is occurring.

if this is the 8gb limit, then all bios based access will fail - all versions of dos to my knowledge and windows non-nt as long as non 32 bit drivers are used;

Experience the same with both mobos?
If not which one are you using?
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mrau wrote:

if this is the 8gb limit, then all bios based access will fail - all versions of dos to my knowledge and windows non-nt as long as non 32 bit drivers are used;

Thing is that before the update both BIOS gave the HDDs as 8192MB, but after update both showed correct size (10.2GB). On the Tekram P5MVP-A4 everything up to 137GB should be supported and is at least recognized correctly in BIOS.

So BIOS doesn't seem the problem here.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Experience the same with both mobos?
If not which one are you using?
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Yes, same in both. Right now I have the disk in the Tyan Tsunami, but I had exactly the same behaviour in the Tekram P5MVP-A4. So it's the combination of software (bog standard DOS 7.1 and Win98SE installers from two different sources, the Win98SE is an official install CD) and HDD as far as I can see.

MS DOS 7.1 or PC DOS 7.1
I dunno what might be different to cause this but that might matter.
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[Easter egging here]
Maybe try FORMAT and FDISK from a WinME BOOT disk.
They may have patched some compatibility issue with that drive model in the later versions.
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Win9x with FAT32 support should be good for that sort of size. First, don't use gdisk as that will create a GPT which DOS can't use. For that matter, just in case there's some kind of overlay on the disk, I'd recommend zeroing out the full MBR.

1dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=512

Then create the partition table via fdisk. How about creating the partition itself with mkfs.vfat via Linux and seeing if it's accessible via DOS?

gdjacobs wrote:

Win9x with FAT32 support should be good for that sort of size. First, don't use gdisk as that will create a GPT which DOS can't […]
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Win9x with FAT32 support should be good for that sort of size. First, don't use gdisk as that will create a GPT which DOS can't use. For that matter, just in case there's some kind of overlay on the disk, I'd recommend zeroing out the full MBR.

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1dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=512

Then create the partition table via fdisk. How about creating the partition itself with mkfs.vfat via Linux and seeing if it's accessible via DOS?

That

I always zero the whole disc for OS changes. Been doing it so long it's automatic.
Didn't even occur to me that others might not.
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