The limitation for these Pentium (socket 7) boards is usually 30GiB.
No, just use FDISK.

dominusprog wrote on 2023-11-11, 15:55:

No, just use FDISK.

Thanks for the reply. So I should boot up into DOS with boot disk and use fdisk to format new hdd?

Any ideas how I should go forward with getting the CD drive working in DOS?

Both Windows 95 and 98 are bootable, you just have to set the boot to CDROM in the BIOS. And if you boot in Win95 setup and hit F3 you can easily format your HDD using FDISK.

dominusprog wrote on 2023-11-11, 19:08:

Both Windows 95 and 98 are bootable, you just have to set the boot to CDROM in the BIOS. And if you boot in Win95 setup and hit F3 you can easily format your HDD using FDISK.

I think only the OEM version of 98 is bootable. 95 retail certainly is not bootable, though I would presume some custom large OEM recovery disks with 95 on it would have been. Not sure about a non-OEM-specific OSR2-type OEM version of 95...

Also, I would add an interesting quirk: the 98SE OEM disk is set up in a weird way with two partitions/sessions/etc or something. There's like a virtual floppy that boot DOS and loads a generic IDE CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX to access the actual real CD part of it. Interestingly, and I know this from experience, if you boot it on a SATA ODD not recognized by that generic IDE CD-ROM driver... congratulations, you end up at a command line prompt with no access to the real CD part.

The problem is that my bios lists only floppy, hdd or "compatible" as bootable devices..

https://ibb.co/PhdYpsK
https://ibb.co/3BsZL45

I should probably load the CDROM driver in autoexec.bat and/or config.sys from boot floppy disk?

iikkak wrote on 2023-11-11, 19:50:

The problem is that my bios lists only floppy, hdd or "compatible" as bootable devices.. […]
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The problem is that my bios lists only floppy, hdd or "compatible" as bootable devices..

I should probably load the CDROM driver in autoexec.bat and/or config.sys from boot floppy disk?

Yup, you need a DOS boot floppy. CD-ROM driver is loaded in config.sys, then MSCDEX is loaded in autoexec.bat and set to talk to that CD-ROM driver. Can be DOS 6.22 or the DOS versions built into 95/98.

There are generic images with generic CD-ROM drivers floating around that might work well, too.

Just ordered a usb floppy drive. Cannot borrow one right now, this was like third time I needed one so pulled the trigger on one just now.

iikkak wrote on 2023-11-11, 20:05:

Just ordered a usb floppy drive. Cannot borrow one right now, this was like third time I needed one so pulled the trigger on one just now.

I believe you will need BIOS support for USB floppy disk emulation in order to be able to boot from it...

The quickest way to prepare an hard disk to make it bootable to then install Windows 9x is to use Rufus 4.x on a modern machine, chose Boot selection -> MS-DOS and DOWNLOAD next to it and then make a folder called for example W98SETUP and copy the content of the iso into it.

This will make the drive boot to a simple DOS prompt from which you can then start the Windows installation from that W98SETUP folder. This also has the advantage that installing Windows to C: from C: means it won't ever ask you for the install CD by default because the files are already on the HDD.

Since Rufus added the support for creating actual MS-DOS bootable disks and not just FreeDOS like before there is no need for floppies or other acrobatics to boostrap a machine

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-11, 20:07:

I believe you will need BIOS support for USB floppy disk emulation in order to be able to boot from it...

I meant that I will use the usb floppy drive on my newer pc : )

Ok rufus sounds good and makes more sense in preparing the HDD with the new pc! Didn't even think about that as an option although i've used rufus for quite a bit! Good idea!

I should limit the HDD capacity to 30gb with rufus probably?

[/quote]
I should limit the HDD capacity to 30gb with rufus probably?
[/quote]

There was no need to do that.

I checked BIOS compability tabs in rufus, and chose DOWNLOAD with MS-DOS boot option.

Everything worked perfectly!

Thanks for the support everyone!

Attached pic of my setup, Finnish Mikromikko ergo model, with P1 cpu and original OR brand speakers : )

About the max usable size in a practical sense for that era of computer is 128gb

The ide to sata adapters that plug into the motherboard don’t work that well when ever I have tried them.

If you are trying to keep it original as possible, while still upgrading , buy a 120gb ide maxtor

If you want to upgrade the speed/size and don’t care about original setups

Buy a promise tx4 sata II pci controller, a 2.5 to 3.5” adapter plate, a 2.5” to sata m.2 hard drive adapter enclosure, and a 128gb sata m.2 ssd

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvIxKVf this adapter has worked fine this far. At least the user experience is snappy. Havent ran any benchmarks, probably will not, if everything works fine 😀

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-02, 08:25:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvIxKVf this adapter has worked fine this far. At least the user experience is snappy. Havent ran any benchmarks, probably will not, if everything works fine 😀

How did you get it working with a 30GB drive/partition. It is using an updated bios. All Pentium 1 motherboards I have (430fx/hx) won't boot with anything above 8GB.

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-12-02, 22:38:

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-02, 08:25:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvIxKVf this adapter has worked fine this far. At least the user experience is snappy. Havent ran any benchmarks, probably will not, if everything works fine 😀

How did you get it working with a 30GB drive/partition. It is using an updated bios. All Pentium 1 motherboards I have (430fx/hx) won't boot with anything above 8GB.

Many motherboards from that era have patched BIOS available that allow use of up to 128 gigabyte hard drives. Jan Steunebrink (Chkcpu) has done quite a few of these, and he even did one for my Asus TXP4 which supports up to 500 gigabyte drives just to see if he could. I use a Sil3114 SATA card in the system to get the full speed out of the SSD I use, but it's nice to know that the board can work with a drive that large.

Re: Any way to add large HDD support to 440BX BIOS?

I don't know why, but I get "full" 490-something gigs of HDD space - at least what windows resource manager shows. Haven't tried to fill the hdd totally. My old Nokia Mikromikko pc was owned by someone's grandma, so I PRESUME she hasn't done any BIOS tweaks to her machine...but who knows.

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-04, 13:35:

I don't know why, but I get "full" 490-something gigs of HDD space - at least what windows resource manager shows. Haven't tried to fill the hdd totally. My old Nokia Mikromikko pc was owned by someone's grandma, so I PRESUME she hasn't done any BIOS tweaks to her machine...but who knows.

What is the model of the motherboard you have. If you don't know you can see the bios string # at the POST screen right when you boot your computer and it shows the processor speed. Press the PAUSE key on the keyboard (next to scroll lock) and write down the bios string at the bottom of the screen.

Just to give some more details on these limits:

August 1999 - 33.8 GB limit ( 64K Cylinder limit). Many BIOS older than August 1999 stored cylinder values as a 16 bit int, so they have issues when a drive reports cylinders > 65535. These computers are limited to 33.8 GB storage devices.

September 2001 - 137.4 GB limit ( LBA28 limit). BIOS older than September 2001 only used ATA-5, which only used 28 bits to identify each LBA sector, limiting drive capacity to 137GB. ATA-6 added an additional 48bit LBA sector field.

If you need to work around these limits, you have a couple options:

• Find a newer system board BIOS for your system
• Add a drive controller with a proprietary Option ROM that works around these limits
• Add XTide Universal Bios option ROM
• Run a boot loader that replaces your INT13 BIOS call on boot
  --- EZ-Drive version 9.09W will get you up to 137GB
  --- OnTrack Disk Manager 10.46 will get you past 137GB but takes 2 diskettes and requires 16MB RAM

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-04, 13:35:

I don't know why, but I get "full" 490-something gigs of HDD space - at least what windows resource manager shows. Haven't tried to fill the hdd totally. My old Nokia Mikromikko pc was owned by someone's grandma, so I PRESUME she hasn't done any BIOS tweaks to her machine...but who knows.

Gateway 2000 overdrive build

If using a later version of windows, sometimes you can get the full size after booting windows.
Even though the bios reports wrong. For this you must have the boot partition in a area the bios can see.

The 128gb deal is kinda a fat 32 thing if I am recalling correctly from my experiments win 9x really is the best os for this era of computers. It runs things much faster than NT based OS

Technically, with the correct OS and hardware, it is possible to get above 2tb with this era of hardware I have a thread about that somewhere, not sure where it went. But basically xp modded with server 2003 files or third party software. Or server 2003 its self will do this.