VOGONS


First post, by bc732

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

This is on a Dell Inspiron 5000E running 98SE. Basically I can create a large partition, and use it, but if drive usage goes over ~8GB, I get a blue screen with write error.

I have tried this with both a Samsung 160GB spinning drive, as well as an MSATA adapter with 128GB drive.

The BIOS sees the hard drive as being 65535MB. There are no BIOS settings relating to hard drives. BIOS is the latest version.

FDISK is able to partition the entire drive. I have tried with Ontrack too.

Everything works great, as long as there is less than ~8GB used on the drive.

If I put the drive in a newer machine, and copy more than 8GB of data to it, I cannot read the files or directory on the older machine.

If I start filling up the drive from within windows 98, it will blue screen when I get over ~8GB.

I hope that somebody has an idea, because this is driving me nuts.

Reply 1 of 4, by MrMateczko

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Try creating a smaller partition, something like 10GB, do not use the whole drive.
You can also try obtaining a 64GB or smaller drive, seems your laptop doesn't like larger drives.

Reply 3 of 4, by dormcat

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Have you tried updating the BIOS? Dell still offers A06 BIOS for Inspiron 5000e.

However, even with an updated BIOS, I'd recommend using an HDD no larger than 60 GB as the FDISK and FORMAT provided by "DOS 7.1" of Win98SE can only deal with 32 GB maximum.

I'd divide

  • a 60 GB into two 30 GB partitions
  • a 40 GB into one 30 GB and one 10 GB partitions
  • a 30 GB or smaller HDD to one larger and one smaller (10-20%) partitions

Drive D is for a copy of all Win98SE files from the CD, plus all necessary drivers for chipset, graphics card, sound card, network adapters, etc.

There are ways to tweak Win98SE for >512 MB RAM and >32 GB partitions but unless you want to create a specialized build or pursue benchmark scores I'd say staying within the original limitations would be much more stable for most software.

For the record, my first Win98 desktop in 1999 had an 8.4 GB HDD, and my first WinXP laptop in 2003 had a 20 GB HDD. Dell Inspiron 5000e was designed in mid-2000 and the last BIOS update was released in May 2001, so I'd say an 160 GB HDD or 128 GB SSD could be much bigger than the computer capable to handle.

Reply 4 of 4, by Gmlb256

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t
dormcat wrote on 2021-10-11, 08:19:
Have you tried updating the BIOS? Dell still offers A06 BIOS for Inspiron 5000e. […]
Show full quote

Have you tried updating the BIOS? Dell still offers A06 BIOS for Inspiron 5000e.

However, even with an updated BIOS, I'd recommend using an HDD no larger than 60 GB as the FDISK and FORMAT provided by "DOS 7.1" of Win98SE can only deal with 32 GB maximum.

I'd divide

  • a 60 GB into two 30 GB partitions
  • a 40 GB into one 30 GB and one 10 GB partitions
  • a 30 GB or smaller HDD to one larger and one smaller (10-20%) partitions

Drive D is for a copy of all Win98SE files from the CD, plus all necessary drivers for chipset, graphics card, sound card, network adapters, etc.

There are ways to tweak Win98SE for >512 MB RAM and >32 GB partitions but unless you want to create a specialized build or pursue benchmark scores I'd say staying within the original limitations would be much more stable for most software.

For the record, my first Win98 desktop in 1999 had an 8.4 GB HDD, and my first WinXP laptop in 2003 had a 20 GB HDD. Dell Inspiron 5000e was designed in mid-2000 and the last BIOS update was released in May 2001, so I'd say an 160 GB HDD or 128 GB SSD could be much bigger than the computer capable to handle.

There is an updated version of Windows 98 FDISK (look for 263044usa8.exe or the localized equivalent) that can handle partitions up to 512GB and didn't need any tweaking unlike >512MB RAM memory.

I'm currently using a 64GB HDD and 80GB HDD without any issues on my Socket 7 and Slot 1 computers respectively but that requires motherboard BIOS support or Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) such as Ontrack Disk Manager. True that back then we didn't use such large HDD realistically though.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS