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The Devil of ECHS and Dual Booting 98/XP 2000 Sony Viao PCG F-480

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First post, by thepolish

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I recently came upon a Sony PCG-F480. Anyone familiar with Sony laptops of this vintage (and beyond) is undoubtedly aware that factory restore discs, if they exist, are locked to the model numbers. So I've been working on some different methods to get the laptop up and running to as close to factory as I could. Utilizing generously backed up hard drives Windows 98 is able to be extracted from an image and adding two drivers handles that side of hte house. But I want to dual boot xp.

The problem I run into comes when I try to dual boot, or install xp at all. The laptop has Phoenix bios 4 version 6 which supports up to 8.4GB hard disks. Windows 98 is too old and dumb to care and happily sees my entire 128gb sd to ide setup in paritions of however I decide to set up.

Windows XP on the otherhand, refuses to ever see more than 8.4GB. I have tried the following and am now at my wits end after probably close to 24 straight hours working on this over a week:

(All of the following was tried both with a 4.5GB active partition, first as Partition A an then Partition B)

  • Clone HD image to partition A or B - 7B blue screen
  • Install from xpsp2 or 3 cd - xp only sees 8.4GB in installer and once installed and booted to desktop
  • Load ontrackk 9.54 then try to install from XP BOOT DISKs (they exist) - blue screens during install with 7b
  • Load ontrackk and manually copy over image files (blue screens 7b)
  • Setup 98 then move XP to other partition and try to boot though GRUB / Plop - 7b blue screen
  • Install 98 with partition scheme i want (4 active fat 32), onto partition 1, then image partition 2 with xp.
  • The above but move 98 to partition 2 and image partition 1 (i think this just breaks MBR)
  • Every combination of above but running "fix mbr" prior to whatever I did with XP (I was desperate)
  • Load ontrack and try boot from 98 rescue disk then then boot from CD xp installer (only sees 8.4gb - but this time sees 2 prior made partitions of 4.5 and 3.5 gb)
  • Load ontrack, remove sd drive, copy i386 and smartdrv, reinsert, boot from 98 rescue disk, run smartdrv, then load winnt.exe from hard drive - which gets me though copping files to disk then 98 blue screens ( 7b again? don't remember)

The only thing I haven't tried is an upgrade in place of 98 which is the next stop but I feel like XP is going to again just take BIOS's 8.4 limit and throw it in my face. No chance in two drives on this laptop to my knowledge so I ask - has anyone ever overcome ECHS and XP's installer for a single drive dual boot?

BIOS settings don't seem to give me any help either - there is "LBA" support on (and I'm not fully versed in this) but I don't think it matters when it comes to this last ECHS thing.

Am I missing anything that you would try?

Thanks for any help or insight.

Reply 1 of 3, by Disruptor

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Probably there is a problem with your XP disk driver. Do you use default driver that is supplied with XP?

Install XP in a partition within first 1022 cylinders.
Install 98 on a partition not starting behind cylinder 1022.
Save 98 boot sector to a file and copy that on XP boot drive.
Add a reference to that file to XP boot menu.

You probably need to hide 98 partition from XP, then use a data exchange partition in first 8 GB.

No 3rd party software required.

Reply 2 of 3, by thepolish

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Disruptor wrote on Yesterday, 15:20:
Probably there is a problem with your XP disk driver. Do you use default driver that is supplied with XP? […]
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Probably there is a problem with your XP disk driver. Do you use default driver that is supplied with XP?

Install XP in a partition within first 1022 cylinders.
Install 98 on a partition not starting behind cylinder 1022.
Save 98 boot sector to a file and copy that on XP boot drive.
Add a reference to that file to XP boot menu.

You probably need to hide 98 partition from XP, then use a data exchange partition in first 8 GB.

No 3rd party software required.

Def used the stock storage driver a couple times to no avail. It's like xp can't ignore the echs limit

Once I install xp it cannot see any other partition that exceeds 8.4gb.

So for example I partition a 4gb active partition only. XP's installer will see roughly 4000mb formatted C amd 4400mb information.

It installs fine but in windows it cannot see the "other" 120gb unpartitioned space, ever.

I've used a couple different xp distributors I've collected over the years (home, pro, unattended) all with the same results same with unofficial like 2009 pos updated discs.

It's not a matter so much as being able to install XP on partition 1, and 98 on 2, its that xp wont see the "storage" or data partition(s) after install which is needed for data storage

Reply 3 of 3, by thepolish

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Ok, update, almost a week of working on this.....

I went into bios and set user mode, cylinders, heads and sectors as high as they could go (65535, 16, 63) which has bios report 33822MB LBA format on, multisecotr disabled, lba mode control enabled, 32 bit io enabled, transfermode fpio4/dma2 and ultra dma mode 2. Sure enough setting this random guess let xp's setup see ALL of the 128GB sd card in the adapter. It let me install xp on parition 2 and 98 on partition 1.... but 98 was unaccessable AND the floppy stopped working.

Reducing any of the above cylinders, heads, sectors broke XP, and moving from user mode in bios to the default CHS selections fixed floppy and 98 access.

So this is major progress - Even though floppy boot was broken, I can live with that - since it works within XP (and I assume 98).

Trying to use PLOP to get around the above issues did not work, nor trying to load images onto partitions after I had xp seeing all disks didn't work - at least the vaio xp image I wanted for OEM style

Going to reformat and reinstall, trying 98 first this time and xp second with the partitions as I wanted them (90GB 98 / 30gb xp).

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