StriderTR wrote on 2026-01-01, 19:12:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2025-12-30, 21:43:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-12-30, 21:08:

You can always just use two drives.

If you mean the HDD I currently have and a new one, I can't sadly. I only have enough space for three HDDs in total. One for Windows, one for games, and then one for CD images. 😀

If all else fails, you can also split that 256GB drive into two partitions, one 128GB and one with the remaining space. This is what I did in my Win95 system, but split into 32GB partitions.

That's true. 😀

douglar wrote on 2026-01-01, 16:50:

This type of tool is called a “Dynamic Drive Overlay”. A drive overlay gets installed into a tiny space outside of your normal […]
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DustyShinigami wrote on 2025-12-31, 21:40:

Ahh, I see. Interesting. Learning new stuff all the time. 😀 Just so glad that HDDs are cheap to get, so will look at ordering one very soon and try this out.

Is this a tool that would need booting each time or is it something that only needs to be run the once?

This type of tool is called a “Dynamic Drive Overlay”. A drive overlay gets installed into a tiny space outside of your normal partitions, runs at bootup before your operating system.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/what-is-ddo/index.html

https://www.tek-tips.com/threads/ontrack-dyna … overlay.841791/

Cool. Thanks for the links. 😀

NeoG_ wrote on 2025-12-31, 22:37:

If you have a spare PCI slot you can go down the hardware support route. Something like an older Silicon Image ATA133 controller E.G. SIL0680 non-raid that has the option boot ROM with it's own LBA48 support, or a similar Promise card.

I did actually look into the possibility of getting a PCI board with more IDE ports so I could hook up my other LED cables. I take it that's the same thing...? Or would that be a totally different kind of controller/board?

StriderTR wrote on 2026-01-01, 19:12:

If all else fails, you can also split that 256GB drive into two partitions, one 128GB and one with the remaining space. This is what I did in my Win95 system, but split into 32GB partitions.

I don't think it works for LBA limitations since the limit is in the physical disk access rather than the partition table or file system. The 32GB limit in Win95 was a filesystem limitation where OSR2 could only create up to 32GB FAT32 partitions. Since LBA28 allowed up to 128GB of physical disk access, you could create as many 32GB logical drives as you wanted up to the LBA limit.

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-01-01, 19:23:

I did actually look into the possibility of getting a PCI board with more IDE ports so I could hook up my other LED cables. I take it that's the same thing...? Or would that be a totally different kind of controller/board?

The PCI cards will have activity LED headers for the extra channels - My SIL0680 has two headers, one for each channel. Some have one header for both. Since there's no way for the PCI card to activate the HDD light on the motherboard they have to provide their own.