First post, by Great Hierophant
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Windows 98 has an effective hard drive size limit of approximately 137.4GB. In terms of a physical hard disk drive, a 120GB drive is the largest drive you can expect to work with the OS without the possibility of data corruption. While the FAT32 can support 2TB drives, Windows 98 is safe only with drives within the 28-bit LBA standard, which gives a maximum of 137.4GB. 48-bit LBA patches exist but require BIOS support for them to work reliably. Not everyone wants to sacrifice a PCI slot to a disk controller card.
137.4GB may seem like a huge amount of space, but when you start loading up your drives with full installs of games which originally came on several CDs, that size can start to shrink steadily. Moreover, most games require a CD in their drive to get past a copy-protection check. If you don't want to deal with a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, that requires storing a CD image of game somewhere where a CD emulator like Daemon Tools can access it.
For many years, my preferred method of access was to create shared folders and later a network drive with my modern PC, whether that PC ran Windows XP, 7, 8.1 or 10 and allow my Windows 98SE machine to access it via my home network. This solution worked well to access my vast archive of CD-ROM images via Daemon Tools and install games without having to copy images over to the older machine. Eventually Windows 98 lost the ability to write to a modern Windows network drive, but I really did not care so long as I could read from the network drive.
However, by the time of Windows 10's Fall Creator's Update, that functionality was completely lost. Windows 10 could send files to a folder shared on a Windows 98 machine, but Windows 98 could no longer access the Windows 10 machine at all. I believe I found the reason it fails to communicate, it is that Windows 10 disables SMBv1. SMBv1 is an out-of-date and insecure communications protocol. Ransomware like WannaCry and Petya use SMB as an attack vector to exploit vulnerabilities that end up encrypting your hard drive unless you pay for a decryption key. But Windows 98 doesn't "speak" any version of SMB higher than v1, v2 was introduced with Windows Vista. Hence you get error messages like "Unable to access volume on Windows NT domain" and the like.
Is there a better solution to communicating directly with an old version of Windows than opening up a modern computer to ransomware attacks? If nothing else I could use an older machine as a file server and connect it and the Windows 98SE machine through their own wired network.
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