Update: I checked the disk (partition) at the property dialog in XP and nothing happened. Then in 98se, I ran scandisk on the partition, it generated a huge amount of fragment files and the original folder became inaccessible. Results look the same for all OSes including DOS.
Tried recopy all files in win98 and there is a message about disk full. aborted and checked but the partition still had plenty of free space, meanwhile the XP partition is totally toasted as a unformatted partition. Looks like the copying process is affecting the XP partition which is prior to it. S**t I'm gonna ease all partitions except win98 and do the partition again using some tools in 98.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/159631-testing-m … os-limitations/

I used a usb ping to create my partitions, i don't let scandisk or defrag from Win 98 touch the drive, everythign get's fubared. Need to load it into my win 10 box, checkdisk it and make it work again. I have a 128GB volume for my Win 98 SE system.

I never encountered such situation myself. Tried PowerQuest Partition Manager in 98, created new partitions and found the only difference is:
the extended partition is Extended LBA (0F) same as before but the logical partition is FAT32 without LBA. XP can access the partition without problem.

I found a interesting thing that this time there're more valid folders and fewer corrupted. I guess its because this time I set XP partition smaller than last time, only 5 G (13G last time), and so the logical partition starts 8G ahead.
So it seems like the contents will be inaccessible when exceeded some address space.

RobDos wrote on 2021-11-18, 21:04:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/159631-testing-m … os-limitations/

I used a usb ping to create my partitions, i don't let scandisk or defrag from Win 98 touch the drive, everythign get's fubared. Need to load it into my win 10 box, checkdisk it and make it work again. I have a 128GB volume for my Win 98 SE system.

Its been said DOS and 98 cannot handle HDD capacity larger than 128G cuz they don't support 48bit LBA natively. I never used that large HDD for 98/DOS, 60G is good enough for me.

Okay, if safe mode is working, I probably should use step-by-step mode to locate the driver causing the problem. Gonna do it in next week.

UPDATE: I stopped bothering with win98 because it is a laptop with 855M chipset. Instead, I instlalled WinME and everything works fine. the board has a SoundMax AC97 card so win98 won't get any good (especially DOS bootup) from it since the sound card doesn't support DOS.