VOGONS


First post, by d3vilsadvocate

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So I have this Asus P3BF-3 motherboard with a 128GB ssd that will be full soon enough because of ISOs…

I’m wondering if it‘s possible to run a 512GB SSD if I partition them to 4x128GB?

There are a lot of threats about the limitations of this type of bord and Windows 95/98 but I haven‘t found a definitive answer with regards to partitioning.

I’m aware of the Loew patches for Win 98 but haven‘t tried any of that yet. Also, adding a PCI card is not a an option for me.

Reply 1 of 13, by Joseph_Joestar

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If you have a network card in that system, the easiest solution is to get a NAS.

Connect your Win98 system to it, and then you can mount your backup images over the network, without needing to copy them over to your local drive.

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Reply 3 of 13, by jakethompson1

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The 137GB limit is for the LBA address relative to the start of the drive, not the start of a partition, so breaking down in partitions won't help with it. This (LBA 48 support) is what the Loew patch is supposed to fix however.

Reply 4 of 13, by d3vilsadvocate

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-04, 10:54:

If you have a network card in that system, the easiest solution is to get a NAS.

Connect your Win98 system to it, and then you can mount your backup images over the network, without needing to copy them over to your local drive.

This may ultimately be the best plan, I'm waiting for my network card to arrive anyways.

I suppose I have room for 3x 128GB drives in my setup, should be enough if I don't have to hoard ISOs...

Reply 5 of 13, by matze79

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i used 750Gb external USB 2.0 Harddrive years ago on my Athlon XP ,
it was formated as One Partition.
But 32Kb Clusters are really suboptimal.

Maybe its a better Aproach to get something like a Seagate Dockstar and connect the Drive over Network, using Samba etc.

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Reply 6 of 13, by douglar

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It’s getting harder to make those old insecure SMB versions work on modern servers every year, but I do like the idea of keeping a single software repository when possible.

Linux:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/win9x_samba.htm
Windows 10:
http://kishy.ca/?p=1511
Windows 11:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/micro … -in-windows-11/

Here is a great write up on how to patch win98 for large drives:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/129027-big-hdd-4 … a-thread-index/

Case One: One already has Win 9x working, out of a <137GB disk, and simply wants to add another >137GB IDE HDD, as a second disk, not as system disk:

1) Grab and install BHDD31.ZIP.
2) Reboot. Win 9x now has 48-bit LBA support.
3) Add new (Big) HDD. Partition and format it with The Ranish Partition Manager.
4) Get back to Win 9x and enjoy it!

Case Two: One already has Win 9x working, out of a <137GB disk, and simply wants to substitute it for a >137GB IDE HDD, as system disk:

1) Grab and install BHDD31.ZIP.
2) Reboot. Win 9x now has 48-bit LBA support.
3) Clone the boot partition of the old disk to the boot partition of the new one.
4) Swap the disks.
5) Get back to Win 9x and enjoy it!

Case Three: One wishes to do a fresh install on a >137GB IDE HDD, using the original Windows Install CD.

1) Partition and format the HDD with The Ranish Partition Manager.
2) Start windows install and *turn off* the machine at the point when it starts to reboot into Win 9x.
3) Boot to DOS from a diskette and substitute the file ESDI_506.PDR found at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS by the updated one, grabbed from inside BHDD31.ZIP. Win 9x now has 48-bit LBA support.
4) Resume windows install.
5) After it finishes install BHDD31.ZIP, to update the other programs.
6) Get back to Win 9x and enjoy it!

Case Four: One wishes to do a fresh install on a >137GB IDE HDD, using a modified Windows Install CD.

1) Copy the contents of your Windows 98 install CD to a folder in your HDD. (Let's use D:\98CD\ as an example.)
2) Extract the contents of BHDD31.ZIP to D:\98CD\Win98. (Extracting !read.me, _bighdd.inf, _install.bat and xxFiles.txt isn't necessary.)
3) Extract the boot sector from the original install CD using IsoBuster or UltraISO.
4) Burn the contents of D:\98CD\ to CD or CD-R with your favorite CD burning program. (Don't forget to make your CD bootable with the boot sector you just extracted!)
5) Partition and format the HDD with The Ranish Partition Manager.
6) Install Windows 98 from CD like you would normally do.
7) Get back to Win 9x and enjoy it!

Reply 7 of 13, by d3vilsadvocate

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Oh thanks douglar, very handy. Might try variant 1 as this is exactly what I need.

Do you run ranish partition manager under DOS? Or could you format the disk in a newer system and then simply put it back?

Reply 8 of 13, by Riikcakirds

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douglar wrote on 2023-04-04, 21:41:
It’s getting harder to make those old insecure SMB versions work on modern servers every year, but I do like the idea of keeping […]
Show full quote

It’s getting harder to make those old insecure SMB versions work on modern servers every year, but I do like the idea of keeping a single software repository when possible.

Linux:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/win9x_samba.htm
Windows 10:
http://kishy.ca/?p=1511
Windows 11:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/micro … -in-windows-11/

Here is a great write up on how to patch win98 for large drives:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/129027-big-hdd-4 … a-thread-index/

So in summary, even after using BHDD31.ZIP to give Win 9x 48-bit LBA support, you will still get corruption above 128GB if your motherboard bios doesn't support disks above 128GB.

Reply 9 of 13, by Riikcakirds

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douglar wrote on 2023-04-04, 21:41:
It’s getting harder to make those old insecure SMB versions work on modern servers every year, but I do like the idea of keeping […]
Show full quote

It’s getting harder to make those old insecure SMB versions work on modern servers every year, but I do like the idea of keeping a single software repository when possible.

Linux:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/win9x_samba.htm
Windows 10:
http://kishy.ca/?p=1511
Windows 11:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/micro … -in-windows-11/

Here is a great write up on how to patch win98 for large drives:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/129027-big-hdd-4 … a-thread-index/

So in summary, even after using BHDD31.ZIP to give Win9x 48-bit LBA support, you will still get corruption above 128GB if your motherboard bios doesn't support disks above 128GB.

Reply 10 of 13, by douglar

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d3vilsadvocate wrote on 2023-04-05, 08:02:

Do you run ranish partition manager under DOS? Or could you format the disk in a newer system and then simply put it back?

It's a DOS utility. There are a lot of utilities that perform similar functions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranish_Partition_Manager

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-04-05, 14:09:

So in summary, even after using BHDD31.ZIP to give Win 9x 48-bit LBA support, you will still get corruption above 128GB if your motherboard bios doesn't support disks above 128GB.

Correct, you will likely have a number of issues running windows 98 if you try to attach a drive larger than 137.4GB to a system that doesn't support ATA-6 / LBA48 unless you get very lucky.

If your existing motherboard BIOS does not support LBA48 ( which is most BIOS <= 2003) then , yes, you want to add an option rom to your system that supports LBA48. XTIDE Universal BIOS is a great choice. Most Sata or ATA-133 IDE controllers with a BIOS should work fine too.

Is there any drive overlay utility that supports LBA48? I usually use EZ-drive 9.09 and I don't think it supports LBA48 addressing.

Reply 11 of 13, by douglar

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I took a swing at trying Ontrack Disk Manager 10.46 https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ontrack-disk-manager.html

Seemed like the only overlay available that would be new enough to support LBA48

I had a 1TB WD10EURX sata drive with a Sata --> Pata adapter that seemed like a good candidate

I started with this 1994 vintage motherboard booting with MR BIOS 1.6: a https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/edom-wintech-mv008

Discoveries:

  1. Ontrack Disk Manager 10.46 requires 16MB ram to start
  2. Ontrack Disk Manager 10.46 requires an FPU. I tried it on a 386 and the GUI fails
  3. I got the installer up an running with a 486 chip but then got a brief "invalid translation type" error message and then it won't let me progress past the OS selection screen

Maybe Ontrack Disk Manager 10.46 requires LBA support before it will let you do LBA48.

I'll try a 1996 motherboard that knows about LBA tomorrow.

Reply 12 of 13, by gen_angry

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I just use a retronas install in a proxmox container with a 1tb HD linked to it, and keep all my machines with drives that are the 'max safe capacity' for their OS versions (up to 98SE anyways). Anytime I need it, it's a click to turn it on so it's not on 100% of the time. Works better for me than trying to mess about with LBA patches incompatibility and the like.

It works great with all of my rigs, from a 486sx-25 with DOS to a P4 on XP without issues. The 486 I just transfer via null modem to my 1997 DOS/Win95 build since I don't have a network card for it.

Reply 13 of 13, by douglar

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I got back to testing some more today.

I switched to this board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m919-ver-3.4b with the 3/6/1996 AMI bios . (That windows style bios is still terrible.)

This board supports LBA, and can detect that the large drive exists but locks after the floppy test when the drive was attached and in the in the drive table with the auto detected settings.
I switched to an FC1307 SD adapter with a 256GB SD. Same behavior.
Curiously, sometimes it reports an autodetect of 8.4GB. Other times it auto detects reports 22456MB, which is probably the correct number minus the last digit.
It will boot if I select a smaller geometry. I need to go back with the DIAG card to see where exactly in the post it is failing.

This point, I'm starting to doubt all my cables & cards and I just want something to work to reassure myself that everything is not broken.

I added a lan card with https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/ and removed the drive from the BIOS drive table and the system boots and I'm able to install Ontrack 10.46.
After overriding some warnings, it lets me format the drive as a 256GB fat32 volume using 4KB clusters. I reboot and it all looks good, although it takes about 5 minutes t compute free space on the first DIR.
So that's nifty. It's up and working sort of, in MS Dos 7.1.

What about without xtideuniversalbios ?

I removed the lan card and entered the drive into the bios table as the auto detect. Still locks after the floppy test.

I switched to drive type 45 and Ontrack boot loader fails with "Disk I/O Error Insert OS Setup Disk"

  1. I booted Win98/MS Dos 7.1 and it saw a corrupted 44GB drive
  2. I booted FreeDos 1.2. It tossed out a bunch of LBA errors on boot and saw no hard drives.

So I still want to do it without xtideuniversalbios.

EDIT: I was making things too complicated. Here is what I needed to do:

  1. Select drive type 1 instead of auto select in the BIOS and save it
  2. Do a cold boot for some reason. It wasn't booting from the Ontrack disk for some reason until I did a cold boot
  3. Install Ontrack Disk Manager 10.46

It all works now with as long as I don't go past 137.4GB in real mode.

p.s. Probably need to install the special Ontrack Disk Manager driver for windows 98 though.
p.p.s. 32KB clusters performs better on a 486.