That raid volume, is this where you have Windows 98 installed, or is that on another drive?

I've never tried to go beyond 120 GB 🤣 So not sure what happens. One workaround however is networking. I've got a 2 TB Raid 1 volume that I can access from all my machines. Great for mounting games in Daemon tools 😀

Thanks for your reply. Yes, that volume is where Windows 98 is installed. The PC has no other drives other than the two on RAID 0.

Triton wrote:

Thanks for your reply. Yes, that volume is where Windows 98 is installed. The PC has no other drives other than the two on RAID 0.

Ok I see. Well, everything I read about Windows 98 and drive limits told me that you're asking for trouble. But unless you fill it past 128 MB, it will be hard to tell.

There is a patch / mod that is meant to get around this, but again, I've never tried it. Always happy to stay within the limit.

philscomputerlab wrote:

But unless you fill it past 128 MB, it will be hard to tell.

Hmm...that's not a bad idea. Perhaps I should artificially fill the drive up and see what happens 😈.

But my concern is that if nothing bad does happen, there still could be some kind of *behind the scenes* indexing problem that could gradually stuff everything up. I just don't really know how the LBA system plays with RAID.

Keep in mind that you're not working with a hard disk anymore. You're working with a LUN (logical unit). The LBA limits can be from the BIOS or the ATA HDD driver in Windows 95.

You're not booting from the BIOS anymore. Your LUN is handled by a SCSI-like BIOS, and that BIOS does not have to be limited like ATA BIOS. Once your Windows boot, your HDD may be handled by a different driver (not the included in Windows 98) that may overcome the 28 bit limits. You should check if your LUN is connected to an ATA driver, or a propietary driver from 3ware (did you install some drivers for your card?).

Zup wrote:

Keep in mind that you're not working with a hard disk anymore. You're working with a LUN (logical unit).

Woah, this is pretty cool to know. I didn't think of it that way 😲

I do know that it would occasionally get hangs on the Windows 98 booting screen until I upgraded my motherboard bios to the latest version (which explicitly claims to include LBA 48bits, although maybe another benefit was merely improved integration with the RAID bios?).

As for the RAID driver, I didn't install the 3WARE RAID driver during operating system installation. Without the driver, the 240GB size was still detected. I installed the driver anyway (via Add Hardware), and Windows 98 liked it, but I'm not sure of what difference it made.

If I reinstall Windows 98, is there anything I should be doing differently?

Found something interesting in here:

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pdf - page 17

Controller cards support ATA interface disc drives through their own onboard BIOS and Windows device drivers. These storage cont […]
Show full quote

Controller cards support ATA interface disc drives through their own onboard BIOS and Windows
device drivers. These storage controller cards are plug-and-play compatible and usually detected
in the Windows Device Manager as "SCSI controllers" due to the similarity in disc access
command structure. Since the drives are supported by drivers that emulate the SCSI driver
approach, the native Windows 137GB ATA limitation does not apply since those drivers are not in
use.

It seems to recommend partitioning, but it also claims that Windows is likely to format only 137GB of the drive when the operating system is being installed, leaving the rest automatically unallocated. I'm fairly sure that's not what happened...the entire RAID 0 volume was used.

In one of my Windows 98 machines, I have a 146GB SCSI HDD, not as the boot drive but as a data drive (i.e. Windows 98 is not installed on it). While it was partitioned as a whole, I was always getting weird errors like "Windows shut down improperly, need to check HDDs" while boot up, although nothing like that happened. I repartitioned the drive as 126 + 20 GBs, errors gone.