Quick answer: Yes you need to but no you don't.
For Win98 if the drive does not have a jumper to set the HD below 127Gb (the real number from MS is "The maximum number of clusters on a FAT32 volume is 4,177,918. The maximum volume size that Windows 98 can create is 127.53 GB. not 137Gb)
then you need to use Seatools (or other HD tool) if you want to easily use it under Win98 without issues. See: Re: Hard drive and partition sizes in Windows 98 SE
There are ways to manually set the geometry of the HD in the bios that can do similar to limit the HD but if you ever loose CMOS settings and did not write down the exact you entered it can become a nightmare (been there, done that).
added/edited: I suggest you use Win98 and create a less than 32GB main C partition (max for FAT32), then create a secondary partition to "near max"detected for storage. Break that secondary into less than 32GB partitions so Win98 can use them.
Have done that quite a few times under 98 and XP 32bit to make a good bootable C using FAT32 on drives as big as 250GB. Just a thought

Horun wrote on 2024-05-20, 02:48:

Quick answer: Yes you need to but no you don't. For Win98 if the drive does not have a jumper to set the HD below 127Gb (the re […]
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Quick answer: Yes you need to but no you don't.
For Win98 if the drive does not have a jumper to set the HD below 127Gb (the real number from MS is "The maximum number of clusters on a FAT32 volume is 4,177,918. The maximum volume size that Windows 98 can create is 127.53 GB. not 137Gb)
then you need to use Seatools (or other HD tool) if you want to easily use it under Win98 without issues. See: Re: Hard drive and partition sizes in Windows 98 SE
There are ways to manually set the geometry of the HD in the bios that can do similar to limit the HD but if you ever loose CMOS settings and did not write down the exact you entered it can become a nightmare (been there, done that).
added/edited: I suggest you use Win98 and create a less than 32GB main C partition (max for FAT32), then create a secondary partition to "near max"detected for storage. Break that secondary into less than 32GB partitions so Win98 can use them.
Have done that quite a few times under 98 and XP 32bit to make a good bootable C using FAT32 on drives as big as 250GB. Just a thought

Okay but... what happens if I have a 400gb in there, but only use 120gb of it and leave the rest unallocated?

EDIT: To put another way.... WHY is the SeaTools/resizing step necessary? I could easily look up HOW to do it... what I really want to know is "what will happen if I don't?"

Yes doing that should be fine. Yes you will have 280GB unused AND unusable on that board and OS.
I do not think it is neccesary, but if the drive ever gets locked down to a size smalleror larger than it really is (some OS can do this) then you should "resize " the drive to what it supposed to be.

The trouble is in HDD detection in the BIOS.
Certain BIOSes go crazy when faced with an HDD larger than a certain upper limit (e.g. 504MB on old 386/486s). Some BIOSes will produce corrupt text, some will not recognize the drive, and the worst I've seen is when the computer won't even boot at all (my FIC 486-GVT-2 does that for any CF card larger than 504MB).

In such cases the PC is broken before you even get to DOS and start defining partitions. I haven't tried it myself, but I believe SeaTools would be the only way that could possibly convince such BIOSes to accept a huge HDD. I honestly don't know what kind of hand-shaking happens between the HDD and BIOS at POST, but partitioning the HDD to 500MB and unallocating the rest is not a valid trick. I tried it and the computer still won't POST. But I haven't gotten to try SeaTools and check if it is able to make the PC happy.

Hi EdmondDantes,

A few additions to the previous replies:

Your Epox 8KTA+ uses a 2001 or 2002 Award BIOS and will happily accept drives up to 640GiB. However, BIOSes from that era use a 28-bit LBA interface to talk to the drive and therefore will only "see" the first 127.5GiB/137GB of that drive.
Win98 supports these 127.5Gib/137GB drives sizes out of the box, so I agree with @Horun that you don’t need any Harddisk resizing tool for this setup.

You may want to partition this 127.5GiB/137GB drive size into smaller sections though, to stay within the limits of the FAT32 file system, just as @Horun described earlier in this thread.

Note that to fully break the 127.5GiB barrier, you need a BIOS with 48-bit LBA support but these came later in 2004, after the ATA-6 specification was published in 2003. But then you also need RLowe’s Win98 patch, or a 48-bit LBA capable OS like Win2000 with SP3 or higher, WinXP with SP1 or higher, Vista or later, or Linux with kernel 2.4.19 or later.

@wbahnassi’s reply is also valid, but concerns much older BIOSes.
The 504MB limit was fixed in most BIOSes from July 1994 or later. The new limit then became 2GB or 8GB.
In 1996/1997, the Interrupt 13h extensions with 28-bit LBA support showed up in the BIOS, extending the limit to 127.5GiB but due various bugs the real limit was often 32 or 64GiB. These bugs were mostly fixed by September 1999, resulting in the 127.5GiB limited BIOS you have now.

Cheers, Jan