First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
So you have that huge 500GB hard drive, one that still uses a parallel ATA/IDE interface (80-pin ribbon cable). Feeling the need for storage space, you want to install it in that retro-PC of yours. How do you do it so you can safely store software on it?
You have two prerequisites in order to make that hard drive work, hardware and operating system.
1. Hardware - Your motherboard must support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing or you will need an ATA-6/UDMA 100 PCI interface card. The standard IDE interface on a BX motherboard only supports 28-bit Logical Block Addressing, so you will probably need an interface card or a motherboard with a third party IDE controller. You can almost always disable the motherboard's IDE controllers to free up resources. If you can find a Serial ATA controller that includes a Win 98 driver, all the better.
2. Operating System - If you are using Windows 2000/XP, you simply format in NTFS and you will be happy. But that isn't retro enough, we are dealing with Windows 98 here. No DOS-based version of Windows (which includes everything from 1.0 to ME) supports 48-bit LBA natively, you must use a driver from the interface manufacturer.
This means two very important things. Number one, you cannot use Microsoft's FORMAT, FDISK, SCANDISK and DEFRAG utilities on a 48-bit LBA drive. These utilities also have bugs regarding their implementation of FAT32 that limits their functionality over 127GB. Number two, you cannot install Windows to a 48-bit LBA drive. Therefore, your Windows 98SE drive should be a 28-bit LBA drive (max size was 120GB), the 48-bit LBA drives should be drive E: or above.
A large drive C: is useful for running Windows, its programs and games. The large hard drives E: & F: should be used for storage and backups. You can include disk images on these drives and virtualize them through Daemon Tools. Windows programs, which should go through the IDE controller drivers, can safely store to these drives. DOS programs should be run on the C: drive as they will not deal with Windows drivers and will cause errors if they try to read from a disk addressing system they do not fully understand.
The OS still needs to support FAT32, so you need Win 95 OSR2, Win 98, Win 98SE or Win ME. Otherwise, be prepared for a ridiculous number of partitions.
