Windows 98 ( and I believe 95 as well ) work on FAT32. While FAT32 technically can use up to a 2TB partition, no version of Windows will allow you to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. Using FDISK from the W9x boot floppy, you can enable large drive support and make one partition to trick it into making a partition larger than 32GB, though it can take a long time to format. Otherwise, you can just format the drive using a different OS.

Getting it to actually run on something larger than 137GB is not something I've ever tried, primarily because I don't have near than much need for capacity. I use an 80GB drive with two 32GB partitions to play it safe: one for main system and applications, one to store disc images and other stuff. I only use my W98 machine for DX7 and under. Anything that can run well on XP is there, so I've never come close to filling up 64GB.

For Windows 95, only OSR2 and later supports FAT32 partitions. Prior to this, only FAT partitions were supported like older standalone MS-DOS versions.

I had a 128gb and a 200gb drive using Windows 98se, I used the wi dows ME defrag and had setup the drive with 3rd party tools to start.

I don’t recall any major issues but it is possible that because I never filled the drive it didn’t cause issues.

Up to 128gb, I don’t remember even needing anything much special to get it running though I many times had to use a ddo depending on which machine I was using it with.

So if I understand correctly, if I format in Fat32, the 500GB external disk, windows 95 like the later ones, should it see the whole disk?
I was reading on the internet that special patches were needed to bypass this limit.

NarakuITA wrote on 2022-12-05, 08:03:

So if I understand correctly, if I format in Fat32, the 500GB external disk, windows 95 like the later ones, should it see the whole disk?
I was reading on the internet that special patches were needed to bypass this limit.

external disk might be different. Depending on the interface of course. USB or firewire might be possible. However youre asking a theoretical question and getting theoretical answers. Practical answer is, if its a internal HDD than no your bios would have to support LBA translation of a drive that size in the 1st place. Then you would need some patches so windows could use a partition that size. However you could partition the drive into 4 partitions probably and run the disk without patches maybe don't know for sure and would error on the side of caution about that.

For a external Drive you are not limited by the motherboard BIOS and LBA translation of it so 500GB is possible, however you still may need to format it with another program, like a linux boot disk or something, to get around limitations of MS tools. You still might need software patches, but maybe not.

It could work though.

Before testing on a real PC, is it possible to test on Oracle VM VirtualBox? So to see if it recognizes a USB Disk? Or would the results not be the same?

ya you can test it, you might need NUSB patch. But I don't see any harm of just trying things it's not like youre going to damage anything. Wosrt case scenario it doesn't work. It's not going to start a fire. Or lose any data.

Things are in several layers :

* Up to 1TB is possible, more requires a patche that RLoew made. Apparently Windows uses signed data type when it shouldn't and past 1TB things go to shit due to that, making the maximum of 2TB unreachable.

* LBA48 is another problem for PATA/SATA drives. You must have a BIOS that supports it or stuff beyond 128GB wraps around to beginning of the drive and you lose file system etc. and similarly Windows must have its ESDI_506.PDR file patched to support LBA48 aswell or same thing happens from within Windows. I cannot speak for Win95 but 98SE and ME have patches available to counter these issues. For SCSI and USB drives this is not a problem and only the 1TB bug is in the way.

* Once access issues are sorted out, the partitioning becomes the next issue. FDISK can do partitions the size needed, but it has graphical bugs that prevent entry and display of the large numbers of big drives (there are fixed versions floating around) . You sort of have to use FDISK for bootable drives as it seems to be the only tool I am aware of that aligns things right so that the boot sector code will actually be able to find the DOS core files and run them. Whenever I use any 3rd party tool it causes problems around this, the drives will not be bootable , and sometimes not even after FDISK /MBR option. I'd love to hear about some tools that will work, because FDISK with its integrity check takes forever to deal with the large drives (in fact I am actually sitting and waiting for 1TB RAID array to partition). For drives you aren't gonna boot off, 3rd party tools will be fine and shouldn't be problematic though I have seen a care where SCANDISK will complain about inaccessible last sector with a Paragon partitioning tool.

I'm only interested in External USB drives. I have some disks where I have stored a lot of stuff and I would like to see them on Windows 95, or WinME.
I am currently using Windows 2000, and this problem does not occur.
But for my machine, Windows 2000 is quite heavy, just to start it takes us over 2 minutes.

NarakuITA wrote on 2022-12-05, 10:45:

USB drives ... Windows 95

obligatory Bill Gates and USB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84 😀

http://toastytech.com/files/cruzerwin95.html
https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018 … lement-for.html

I know about this driver, however, it won't read disks larger than 64GB.

I'm not sure how much luck your going to have with this setup. you have 2 things working against you.
1) Large HDD support, 3rd party patches do exist for internal hard drives but don't always work.
2) USB Mass media support, I think this is where your really going to struggle as Windows isn't smart enough to know the difference and will treat it the same as a USB stick and as you said the basic driver is very limited.
A custom driver may exist but it still wouldn't be a 1 driver fixes all scenario.

If it was me I would attach the external drive to a newer PC and access the USB drive over the network. This'll still require a bit of work for the initial setup to get everything going but the likelihood of success is much greater.

So, I did a test. I formatted a 500GB USB drive to Fat23. Windows ME sees it perfectly!
Then I did another test, I took a USB 3.0 disk (with windows 2000 on my IBM330 it is read easily) and formatted to fat32. The virtual machine (Oracle VirtualBox) does not detect the disk.
I set to USB options, USB 3.0 Controller, and this time VirtuaBox detects the connected disk, but Windows ME doesn't!
Solutions?
I also tried with an 8GB USB 3.0 disk formatted in fat32, but it is not detected by Windows.
Appear in device manager USB device Composed with ? green colour.

Ok, I tried on real machine, both 500GB USB 2.0 and USB3.0 are seen by windows 95!!!
Impressive!

Do be aware that USB 1.x transfer speeds will be painfully slow, particularly if you actually want to fill significant parts of those big disks. Consider looking into a USB 2.0 card. Of course that's a whole new can of worms in terms of drivers and of motherboard support (many USB 2.0 cards require 3.3V PCI 2.2, most Win95 systems will have PCI 2.1 at best and only 5V. Try cards with NEC controllers. Not all will work, but most will.

dionb wrote on 2022-12-06, 17:38:

Do be aware that USB 1.x transfer speeds will be painfully slow, particularly if you actually want to fill significant parts of those big disks. Consider looking into a USB 2.0 card. Of course that's a whole new can of worms in terms of drivers and of motherboard support (many USB 2.0 cards require 3.3V PCI 2.2, most Win95 systems will have PCI 2.1 at best and only 5V. Try cards with NEC controllers. Not all will work, but most will.

If there's a large amount of programs and data to put on the drive, and you don't have a USB 2.0 card, you could also consider "Sneaker net", where you attach the drive to a faster computer and fill it up, and then return it to the retro system.

IDE caddies were almost standard on computers in Poland in mid nineties. Pirates even offered copying games directly to client hdd in order to skip expensive CDs.

Fortunately, my IBM 330 already comes with a USB 2.0 card