Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-08-09, 05:39:

Hi Guys,
What was supported Windows 98 IDE hard drive capacity size on motherboard bios from date before year 2000 ?

It varied from model to model. What mobo make and model do you have or particually interested in.

MY K6-2 Mobo bios as sold new tops out at 20gig. Anything over it wont to the drive without help.

I just want to know what was the most commonly supported IDE drive size before year 2000 on motherboards ?
According to “Phils computer lab” you could use a 127gb hard drive using Seagate Seatools to bypass the limitations of the motherboard bios. But I just was to know what were the most common motherboard bios hard drive capacities before year 2000.
And what size IDE hard drives where being sold before year 2000.

Link:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/windows-98-m … e-capacity.html

IMO, the best way to find out that kind of information is to look at ads in computer magazines from that time.

For example, CGW from July 1999 shows that (at the time of printing) new PCs were sold with HDDs ranging from 4 GB (low end), 8 GB (mid range) to 20 GB (high end).

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-09, 13:17:

IMO, the best way to find out that kind of information is to look at ads in computer magazines from that time.

For example, CGW from July 1999 shows that (at the time of printing) new PCs were sold with HDDs ranging from 4 GB (low end), 8 GB (mid range) to 20 GB (high end).

That's certainly how I remembered it. My new IBM PC 300GL mini tower system had a 4.2gig ide hdd in it.

In terms of what what disk sizes were supported before 2000, even as early as 1998, some systems, like my Toshiba 4010CDT, seem to support up to the limits of LBA28 (137.4GB) Are there any utilities available to test BIOS disk access routines for reliable LBA28 functionality ? . There are, however, many systems (motherboards/controller BIOSes) that should theoretically work within and up to LBA28 limits, but have bugs that limit actually (safely without corruption, without hangs at boot, etc) accessible disk sizes .

LBA28 (137.4GB) is the upper possible bound for any system without LBA48 support, which was introduced in 2002.

The edge end of 1999 would at least see 40GB drives. Some would ship a boot floppy to install EZ-BIOS for bioses that don't support the large drive sizes.

My family had a higher end Pentium III PC @733 MHz in ~2000.
The built-in HDD was ATA/ATAPI and had 20GB of capacity.

In the 90s, lower end systems with Windows 9x ranged from anything between a 386 PC with 120MB HDD to Pentiums with several GBs.

Windows 95 RTM required 40MB of HDD space, for example.

Windows 98SE (full install) required a few hundred MBs, I vaguely remember.
With the DRIVER directory copied over to C:\, maybe roughly half a GB.

Personally, I had 98SE and XP once running on a Pentium 166 MMX with a WIDE SCSI hard disk with 1,5GB.
That was roughly 1999-2002, I think. It was a lower end system at the time.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Class mates of mine had notoriously underpowered hardware around the turn of the century.
One of them had a Windows 98SE system running on a 486 PC, I vaguely remember.
It wouldn't upgrade to Windows XP, of course.

Edited.

The first hard drive I ever purchased was a Maxtor ATA66 32 gigabyte in the spring of 2001. That was a pretty big drive then.