It hurts to look at a 2TB drive being forced to work as 32GB drive 😀

HDD manufacturers were aware of this problem in the time, so older drives have a jumper to limit capacity to 32 GB.

I saw this in various documents on WD website. But none of my drives (Smallest is 500GB) has this jumper.

Another question. I loaded the Intel chipset drivers and enabled DMA for the HDD. But this renders the OS inoperable. It doesn't boot any more and hangs half-way. Safe mode works fine however.

Questions:

How can I disable DMA mode again considering I can't access it?

What could cause a lock up like this?

The lock up may have something to do with AHCI vs. IDE emulation mode I guess.
You can try to disable it by setting BIOS to IDE emulation mode and remove the driver.

Board has a Intel BX440 chipset, so just native IDE.

The DMA setting, might this be stored in some INI file so I can set it back? Or can I remove the drivers in Safe mode? I guess I will play around some more tomorrow. Would like to have DMA mode going for benchmarking.

To clarify, the Intel INF drivers installed fine. And without DMA ticket everything works well, I don't notice any slowdowns on a Pentium II 350. But when I enable it and reboot the system locks up.

Just a word of caution about those adapters as they can short out pretty fast when hooked up to a drive that has a high current load when spinning up (best to just use laptop drives). Had one of these cheap adapters burn on me once but at least the drive survived unharmed.

@Mau1wurf1977: Win98SE stores DMA settings in the registry. To remove it in safe mode, you have to open Device Manager and remove the Intel IDE controller, then reboot. The controller should be re-detected and restored back to default settings (no DMA).

As far as using DMA mode with a SATA 2/3 HDD and a SATA to IDE adapter, I tried only once; it didn't work, had the same problem as well. I heard that SATA 1 could work, but haven't had the chance to try. In the end, you may have to switch to a Win9x-compatible SATA PCI controller if you want to have DMA mode.

Oh I see, so it could be the adapter. No worries.

Might just switch back to the CF card then 😀 I'll try setting it up this afternoon.

What about trying a drive overlay to access more than just 32g?

I've only used them on 386's and have no idea how newer gear would fair, but could be worth looking into..

Ow i though you made a 32MB harddisk from an 2 TB one.. 🤣 🤣 🤣

KEC wrote:

What about trying a drive overlay to access more than just 32g?

I've only used them on 386's and have no idea how newer gear would fair, but could be worth looking into..

Yes it works, covered this in one of my YT videos 😀

I always look for new ways and report about them. The more options the better as everyone can pick what suits them.

I found it's a neat way. But it seems that DMA mode cannot be enabled, so I will investigate more and let you all know. Every solution has it's pros and cons.

I have a few of these convert's as well- I ordered these to connect modern optical drives in my legacy machines. Didn't try them with hard drives but if you can get the DMA support to work it would be a nice option down the road.

Decided not to use these for optical drives either since I couldn't figure a way of getting cd sound from the SATA drives to the sound card. Did I miss something there? Have you used these for SATA optical drives and were you able to still get cd sound?

I was fortunate enough to find two retail packaged "brand new in the box" Maxtor 7200 rpm hard drives- 60g and 30 gig respectively. I was super thrilled with these two drives and they are my primary storage devices on my legacy machines (Win98se & Win95c) They are still out there... I keep an eye out for more of these just to have on the shelf for down the road.

Just couldn't bring myself to shrink a 2tb drive down to 32gb. 😀

SATA optical drives play CD audio digitally through the data cable; never tried that with a SATA to IDE adapter, though (technically, it should work.....).

Yea you really need to use IDE optical drives.

I tried a SATA drive on a PCI Sata controller. While you could install Windows fine, once in Windows there was simply no optical drive 😒

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

I heard that SATA 1 could work, but haven't had the chance to try. In the end, you may have to switch to a Win9x-compatible SATA PCI controller if you want to have DMA mode.

Jumpered the HDD to SATA 1 and same issue.

So with this adapter: Leave DMA turned off 😒

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

I heard that SATA 1 could work, but haven't had the chance to try. In the end, you may have to switch to a Win9x-compatible SATA PCI controller if you want to have DMA mode.

Jumpered the HDD to SATA 1 and same issue.

So with this adapter: Leave DMA turned off 😒

Does it have a Jmicron 20330 chipset?

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Does it have a Jmicron 20330 chipset?

Just had a look, yes it does!

Apart from that it's working really well. The Samsung drive is very fast and I don't have the slowdowns with small files like with CF cards.

Reliability has been top notch so far.

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Does it have a Jmicron 20330 chipset?

Could you maybe expand on this chipset?

Are there adapters with different, DMA compatible, chipset?