For any future visitor ending up here, I went ahead and re-partitioned the SSD with Windows ME's FDISK, reformatted, reinstalled and all is well it seems. No more scandisk complaints.

I am still unclear about Win98's internal limits. I've read about some rloew's patches for drives bigger than 137GiB in Win98, but still can't figure out if this is all unnecessary as I use a Promise PCI controller card. My concern is what happens once I go above 128GB on the 500GB drive, will it start corrupting.

I also still have those weird random issues with disks being not detected on boot by the Promise cards, same model running same BIOS on two different configs, but I can live with it. It doesn't happen too often and is easily fixed by rebooting again. And still no clue what's up with that BIOS version or potential updates. Oh well.

i use the maxtor version of the card and never had any issue with the drives not being picked up.

i formatted my drives using a seagate boot disk that came with a seagate hard drive.

windows 98 should work fine with any size drive if u have patched it for LBA

the bios on my maxtor card also has a new a little newer version then the newest version on the promise website.

The 137GB (128GiB) limit is specifically an issue with the standard IDE/ATA drivers included with Windows 98. If you're using a SATA controller that requires third party drivers, then there should be no problem accessing larger filesystems ... once the drivers are loaded.

So, I think the key point is to make sure that the drive/partition which your Windows installation is on fits within the limits, so that during early boot when it's using the BIOS to access the drive and load drivers, it's able to access everything. (I'm not sure whether the available patches might help with that.)

I haven't had any issues (yet) with using a larger secondary drive on a PCI SATA controller (Sil3114 in my case).

Thanks for the confirmation, that was my understanding and why I chose 120GB SSD's as OS drives. So I should be good to go 😀

I also have a Sil3114 card and a another VIA based one. The VIA is shit, the Sil3114 was mostly ok, except my older builds would freeze when booting win98, when installation itself went fine (on 2 different computers). It would only play good with my WinXP build but even then I had a few issues down the road...switched it to a Promise S150II-TX4 and all is well since then.

ya those silcon image cards are crap for older machines. i had one of those 3112 cards and with all but a super old bios on the card from 2003 it would just freeze up when it came time for it to run drive detection. with the 2003 bios u could get windows 98 installed but as soon as u shut the system down it would start to corrupt everything. funny thing is u could reboot many many times getting stuff installed and it would be fine it was just when u shut the system fully down it all went to crap. i think mainly the problem was there was no proper windows 98 driver for the card 98 was iding it as some generic ide. were the promise card sata150 card promise offers a 98 driver for it on there site with the driver installed the promise card is saw by 98 as a scsi card.