Having thought about it, if on a modern system, you formatted a filesystem bigger than 32GB with a forced cluster size of 4K rat […]
Show full quote
khyypio wrote on 2020-10-22, 16:29:
I suppose that´s one possiblity. You have a very similar system as I do, right? How did you get it up an running?
Having thought about it, if on a modern system, you formatted a filesystem bigger than 32GB with a forced cluster size of 4K rather than the 32K that it should default to, that is likely the reason Windows 98 SE and its DOS are choking on it as using a cluster size too small on a big file FAT32 filesystem will result in too many cluster for Windows 98 SE (and its DOS) to handle .
EDIT : See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previo ... dfrom=MSDN
With a 4K cluster size and a maximum of 4,177,918 of cluster , you can create a FAT32 filesystem about 16GB (a bit less actually) in size . Creating anything bigger with 4K clusters will be out of spec and Windows 98 SE (and its DOS) will not like it . If you want to create a bigger FAT32 filesystem, you must use a cluster size bigger than 4K . The biggest that Windows 98 Se will allow is 127GB with a 32K cluster size .
It has been a while (I last installed something like 4-5 years ago), but I think I was using a SIL3114 (or possibly a SIL3512) SATA controller at the time and I created my partitions in Linux (or maybe Freedos FDISK, which I do not recommend), formatted them in Windows 98SE's DOS and installed Windows . Even though it was not absolutely necessary at the time (SIL3114/SIL3512 do not use ESDI_506.PDR, so Windows was using BIOS compatibility mode until I install the SIL drivers), I still installed BHDD31.ZIP for the included utilities. I eventually switched to the onboard ICH2 controller and since BHDD31 was already installed, I did not need to do anything special .
My recommendation is to
a) partition with whatever modern alignment aware tool you like on a modern PC .
b) format as FAT32 on the destination retro PC (or on a modern PC with a 32K cluster size) and make sure everything is readable and writable .
c) Optionally, confirm on the modern PC that alignment is still OK (it should be)
d) Install Windows 98SE following the instructions provided with BHDD31.ZIP
If step b) fails, something is wrong either on you retro setup or the partition tools you used to create your partitions .