Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-04, 14:31:

The 128gb deal is kinda a fat 32 thing if I am recalling correctly from my experiments win 9x really is the best os for this era of computers. It runs things much faster than NT based OS

It's not a file system thing exactly. It's an ATA-5 vs ATA-6 thing, specifically LBA28 vs LBA48. LBA48 uses different commands than LBA28, so it trickles up to your device driver to use the new commands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

ATA-6 introduced 48-bit addressing, increasing the limit to 128 PiB (144 PB). As a consequence, any ATA drive of capacity larger than about 137 GB must be an ATA-6 or later drive. Connecting such a drive to a host with an ATA-5 or earlier interface will limit the usable capacity to the maximum of the interface.

Some operating systems, including Windows XP pre-SP1, and Windows 2000 pre-SP3, disable LBA48 by default, requiring the user to take extra steps to use the entire capacity of an ATA drive larger than about 137 gigabytes.

Older operating systems, such as Windows 98, do not support 48-bit LBA at all. However, members of the third-party group MSFN have modified the Windows 98 disk drivers to add unofficial support for 48-bit LBA to Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME.

Some 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems supporting LBA48 may still not support disks larger than 2 TiB due to using 32-bit arithmetic only; a limitation also applying to many boot sectors.

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-01, 12:07:

Attached pic of my setup, Finnish Mikromikko ergo model, with P1 cpu and original OR brand speakers : )

This is off-topic but could you please remind me the name of that game ?

mtest001 wrote on 2023-12-04, 17:02:

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-01, 12:07:

Attached pic of my setup, Finnish Mikromikko ergo model, with P1 cpu and original OR brand speakers : )

This is off-topic but could you please remind me the name of that game ?

One Must Fall 2097 ?

Yeah one must fall!

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-12-04, 14:08:

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-04, 13:35:

I don't know why, but I get "full" 490-something gigs of HDD space - at least what windows resource manager shows. Haven't tried to fill the hdd totally. My old Nokia Mikromikko pc was owned by someone's grandma, so I PRESUME she hasn't done any BIOS tweaks to her machine...but who knows.

What is the model of the motherboard you have. If you don't know you can see the bios string # at the POST screen right when you boot your computer and it shows the processor speed. Press the PAUSE key on the keyboard (next to scroll lock) and write down the bios string at the bottom of the screen.

Here is a screencap of the bootup screen:
https://ibb.co/mSR8pxf

douglar wrote on 2023-12-04, 15:02:

It's not a file system thing exactly. It's an ATA-5 vs ATA-6 thing, specifically LBA28 vs LBA48. LBA48 uses different command […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-04, 14:31:

The 128gb deal is kinda a fat 32 thing if I am recalling correctly from my experiments win 9x really is the best os for this era of computers. It runs things much faster than NT based OS

It's not a file system thing exactly. It's an ATA-5 vs ATA-6 thing, specifically LBA28 vs LBA48. LBA48 uses different commands than LBA28, so it trickles up to your device driver to use the new commands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

ATA-6 introduced 48-bit addressing, increasing the limit to 128 PiB (144 PB). As a consequence, any ATA drive of capacity larger than about 137 GB must be an ATA-6 or later drive. Connecting such a drive to a host with an ATA-5 or earlier interface will limit the usable capacity to the maximum of the interface.

Some operating systems, including Windows XP pre-SP1, and Windows 2000 pre-SP3, disable LBA48 by default, requiring the user to take extra steps to use the entire capacity of an ATA drive larger than about 137 gigabytes.

Older operating systems, such as Windows 98, do not support 48-bit LBA at all. However, members of the third-party group MSFN have modified the Windows 98 disk drivers to add unofficial support for 48-bit LBA to Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME.

Some 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems supporting LBA48 may still not support disks larger than 2 TiB due to using 32-bit arithmetic only; a limitation also applying to many boot sectors.

Sorry, I guess I recalled incorrectly that fat 32 had a size limit there also. I know Jan’s bioses are usually good to 128gb. I recall there being sometimes a OS capability to use more than that.

Example, my scsi is limited to 8gb but my win 95 is on a 128gb partition which if I recall correctly was the biggest partition it would let me format on a slightly larger than that drive? Might be remembering incorrectly.

Perhaps some later versions of windows/fat32 didn’t have this issue? Or I could be remembering wrong. In any case. Feel free to correct me 😀

Btw, Jan himself has said his latest patches might work on drives in the 500gb range on IDE but will only show 128gb in bios, later in windows the rest will show. I was going to test this for him on the s1564 tyan but at the time I didn’t have a large drive like that. I may be able to test now. I might have a larger one. Will have to check.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-04, 21:01:

Sorry, I guess I recalled incorrectly that fat 32 had a size limit there also. I know Jan’s bioses are usually good to 128gb. I recall there being sometimes a OS capability to use more than that.

The max volume size for FAT32 is 2TiB. It’s kind of inefficient though becuase you have to use a 64KiB cluster size to do that. If you use a 4KiB cluster size, you would be limited to a 128GiB volume size. Maybe the tool that you were using to format drives didn’t let you use large cluster sizes.

The max device size for LBA28 addressing is 2^28 sectors of 512 bytes each, which = 137.4GB if you do base 10, which is how drives manufacturers commonly reported at that time, or 128GiB, which is how your operating system might have reported it. LBA was available since ATA-1 spec was released, however there were a lot of twists and turns with the actual implementation that caused a number of limitations to come out in practice before the ultimate LBA28 limit was reached

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

douglar wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:20:

The max volume size for FAT32 is 2TiB. It’s kind of inefficient though becuase you have to use a 64KiB cluster size to do that. […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-04, 21:01:

Sorry, I guess I recalled incorrectly that fat 32 had a size limit there also. I know Jan’s bioses are usually good to 128gb. I recall there being sometimes a OS capability to use more than that.

The max volume size for FAT32 is 2TiB. It’s kind of inefficient though becuase you have to use a 64KiB cluster size to do that. If you use a 4KiB cluster size, you would be limited to a 128GiB volume size. Maybe the tool that you were using to format drives didn’t let you use large cluster sizes.

The max device size for LBA28 addressing is 2^28 sectors of 512 bytes each, which = 137.4GB if you do base 10, which is how drives manufacturers commonly reported at that time, or 128GiB, which is how your operating system might have reported it. LBA was available since ATA-1 spec was released, however there were a lot of twists and turns with the actual implementation that caused a number of limitations to come out in practice before the ultimate LBA28 limit was reached

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

I think that sounds correct.

Will older OS work with the larger cluster sizes?

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:46:

Will older OS work with the larger cluster sizes?

If your OS supports FAT32, it should work fine with the larger cluster size. I've been able to use DOS 7.1 that comes with Windows 98 with 64KB clusters. What OS were you thinking of using?

The problem that I've seen with large FAT32 volumes on old computers is that the CPU starts to become a bottleneck. As a test, I wanted to see if I could get an LBA48 device working on an AMD 486-133 & MSDOS 7.1. I was able to mount a 256GB SD card via a Sinitechi adapter by adding OnTrack Disk Manager 10.46, but after each boot, the first "dir C:" command seemed like it would take > 60 seconds to calculate the free space on C:. Took so long that the first time I got impatient and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del thinking the system had locked, not realizing that it was just going to be slow. Maybe I could have masked the performance issues using smart drive or increasing the buffers in the config.sys. Since then, the rough guidelines I've followed have been to stay under 256MB for an XT, 2GB for a 386sx-16, 32GB for a 486-133, and 256GB for a Pentium MMX-200. Those sizes are all about 10x larger than anything you would have seen back in the day when the systems were reaching end of life. Anyway, the moral of the story is that the FAT32 file system will be CPU limited to an extent that noticeably affects usability if you try to put anachronistically large fat32 storage on a really old computer.

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-04, 19:10:

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-12-04, 14:08:

iikkak wrote on 2023-12-04, 13:35:

I don't know why, but I get "full" 490-something gigs of HDD space - at least what windows resource manager shows. Haven't tried to fill the hdd totally. My old Nokia Mikromikko pc was owned by someone's grandma, so I PRESUME she hasn't done any BIOS tweaks to her machine...but who knows.

What is the model of the motherboard you have. If you don't know you can see the bios string # at the POST screen right when you boot your computer and it shows the processor speed. Press the PAUSE key on the keyboard (next to scroll lock) and write down the bios string at the bottom of the screen.

Here is a screencap of the bootup screen:
https://ibb.co/mSR8pxf

Can't find anything on theretroweb.com from the version number on the picture. Is there any more text printed near the bottom of the same screencap outside of the picture.

Yrouel wrote on 2023-11-11, 20:40:

The quickest way to prepare an hard disk to make it bootable to then install Windows 9x is to use Rufus 4.x on a modern machine, chose Boot selection -> MS-DOS and DOWNLOAD next to it and then make a folder called for example W98SETUP and copy the content of the iso into it.

This will make the drive boot to a simple DOS prompt from which you can then start the Windows installation from that W98SETUP folder. This also has the advantage that installing Windows to C: from C: means it won't ever ask you for the install CD by default because the files are already on the HDD.

Since Rufus added the support for creating actual MS-DOS bootable disks and not just FreeDOS like before there is no need for floppies or other acrobatics to boostrap a machine

great tip i was not aware of this new rufus functionality

Yrouel wrote on 2023-11-11, 20:40:

The quickest way to prepare an hard disk to make it bootable to then install Windows 9x is to use Rufus 4.x on a modern machine, chose Boot selection -> MS-DOS and DOWNLOAD next to it and then make a folder called for example W98SETUP and copy the content of the iso into it.

Excuse my ignorance but if I plugged in a 120GB SSD via a USB adapter to my Win10 PC, ran rufus and did the above (directed to the connected USB SSD), it would partition and format the disk and copy MS-DOS to it (what version and what fat16/32). Is that correct?

Yrouel wrote on 2023-11-11, 20:40:

The quickest way to prepare an hard disk to make it bootable to then install Windows 9x is to use Rufus 4.x on a modern machine, chose Boot selection -> MS-DOS and DOWNLOAD next to it and then make a folder called for example W98SETUP and copy the content of the iso into it.

This will make the drive boot to a simple DOS prompt from which you can then start the Windows installation from that W98SETUP folder. This also has the advantage that installing Windows to C: from C: means it won't ever ask you for the install CD by default because the files are already on the HDD.

Since Rufus added the support for creating actual MS-DOS bootable disks and not just FreeDOS like before there is no need for floppies or other acrobatics to boostrap a machine

the problem with rufus would actually be ...how to prepare the drive using rufus for:

1) A 486 pc that does not support very large HDDs, i think back then my hdd was 750mb
2) a pentium pc that supports about 30gb of HDD space, back then my hdd was 1.3gb

so total amount of GB restrictions per bios can cause an issue. i think

would be nice to see tutorials on how to prepare a HDD to work on an old pc that has no bios patch.

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-12-07, 12:56:

Excuse my ignorance but if I plugged in a 120GB SSD via a USB adapter to my Win10 PC, ran rufus and did the above (directed to the connected USB SSD), it would partition and format the disk and copy MS-DOS to it (what version and what fat16/32). Is that correct?

Yes, what Rufus does is essentially a format C: /S

This was made possible by Microsoft having diskcopy.dll available for download. While it's a dll it contains a Windows ME boot disk image which is the source of the system files.

I don't remember if it's fat16 or fat32, I think fat32

SETBLASTER wrote on 2023-12-07, 13:33:

the problem with rufus would actually be ...how to prepare the drive using rufus for: […]
Show full quote

the problem with rufus would actually be ...how to prepare the drive using rufus for:

1) A 486 pc that does not support very large HDDs, i think back then my hdd was 750mb
2) a pentium pc that supports about 30gb of HDD space, back then my hdd was 1.3gb

so total amount of GB restrictions per bios can cause an issue. i think

would be nice to see tutorials on how to prepare a HDD to work on an old pc that has no bios patch.

Yes you're still somewhat restricted by the limitation of the destination machine, so not a Rufus limitation since you'd have to deal with it regardless.

What Rufus does is enabling to do things that would otherwise require another machine with DOS/Windows 9x already or other stuff that's not typical on a modern machine like floppies or disc burner