I have the same board (also Award BIOS 1.3), running with PIII 700, 256 MB RAM and 120GB Crucial BX500 SSD. The SSD is connected to the onboard IDE controller using one of the cheap bidirectional IDE <-> SATA adapters. At the moment there is 6 GB partition for win98 and 84 GB partition for games. The rest of the space is free, unalocated - possibly could be used by the SSD controler for wear leveling, but no idea if it really works.

I don't remember for sure... but I think I created the partitions on this machine and it went fine. Of course there is the well known bug with windows 98 fdisk that reports the disk capacity lower than it really is (around 10 GB I think).

I run my Intel X25E 32GB SSD off a Promise SATA150TX2+ controller on my MS-6168. No problems - but I also run Win2k on it, so NTFS, which means basically a totally different setup.

As usual when having issues like this I couldn't immediately figure out, I would personally try a different OS to differentiate between hardware and software issues. My go-to solution for that is Knoppix, the first widely-used Linux LiveCD distribution. Boot into that from CD, then try to partition the HDD from in Linux. If it's BIOS issues, you'll hit the exact same problem as with Win98SE. If it's FDISK limits, you'll not have any problems. Note that you can partition disks with FAT32 from in Linux, so also from Knoppix, so just try that. If you succeed you can then boot into your Windows install media, format the partition and continue from there.

Note that the newer Knoppix releases dropped support for this sort of old stuff, but Internet Archive to the rescue: https://archive.org/details/knoppix-3.3-2003-11-14-en

I actually installed Knoppix on a small IDE HDD so I don't need to mess around with optical media.

Do you happen to have a regular IDE disk laying around? 160GB or bigger will also do, keeping the 137GB limit in mind. That doesn't really matter for testing purposes.

havli wrote on 2023-12-26, 13:27:

I have the same board (also Award BIOS 1.3), running with PIII 700, 256 MB RAM and 120GB Crucial BX500 SSD. The SSD is connected to the onboard IDE controller using one of the cheap bidirectional IDE <-> SATA adapters. At the moment there is 6 GB partition for win98 and 84 GB partition for games. The rest of the space is free, unalocated - possibly could be used by the SSD controler for wear leveling, but no idea if it really works.

I don't remember for sure... but I think I created the partitions on this machine and it went fine. Of course there is the well known bug with windows 98 fdisk that reports the disk capacity lower than it really is (around 10 GB I think).

Thanks! Then 90GB shouldn’t be a problem on that bios.
I’ll try to dig out a different HDD and try.

Also forgot to mention that I use xfdisk, since I want to have both DOS and Win98 in parallel while sharing the extended portion for games.
Have had no trouble with xfdisk in the past, so most likely the disk.
I’ll also try and find some program that can write all zeros to the disk and see if that might help.

Update:
Managed to partition the disk by using xfdisk to create two primary partitions and setup a boot menu, the extended/logical I created on my modern PC via 3rd party tool and a usb enclosure.

for hdd size limits/problems I always start with biospatcher from rom.by

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-12-30, 00:36:

for hdd size limits/problems I always start with biospatcher from rom.by

Thanks, haven’t tried that, will look into that.

Actually stumbled upon next problem, seems that if i align the partitions according to what seems to be SSD standard, XFDISK bugs out.
Gonna see if plop works better