I have a Maxtor 80GB IDE hard drive that when I run Fdisk against it, it will not let me create either a primary partition or a extended partition. It reports there is no space.
However when I display partitions, it doesn't list any and looks as if the drive is blank.
Anyone run across something like this? Using a boot disk created in Win98, so it should support the capacity.
It's too big for the fdisk that came with Windows 98. You can find a patched fdisk that MS released later. Or, use another partitioning utility, such as a Linux live CD.
Windows 98se does support up to 127GB. This depends on motherboard's bios. Pentium era is up to 8GB, early PII and PIII boards 32GB, and later ones supported any size greater than 127GB but windows 98se has a wrap around issue that corrupts data at the beginning of partition.
I ran into this few times saying can see, can't do anything was few minutes on DBAN or use linux live cd to delete all the partition and wipe hd clean cleared the filesystem enough so fdisk will work again.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
It was my understanding Win98 could see drives up to about 127GB.
Edit:
This is on a ASUS A7V board and the BIOS auto detects it fine.
Just found this site that lists a debug program to run that apparently wipes out the MBR. Had zero experience with debug and never used it, but figured what do I have to loose.
https://forum.pcmech.com/threads/formatting-r … rminated.75115/
Will type it here in case the link ever dies.
Boot with a DOS floppy that has "debug" on it; run "debug". At the '-' prompt, "block-fill" a 512-byte chunk of memory with zero […]
Boot with a DOS floppy that has "debug" on it; run "debug". At the '-' prompt, "block-fill" a 512-byte chunk of memory with zeroes:
f 9000:0 200 0
Start assembly mode with the 'a' command, and enter the following code:
mov dx,9000
mov es,dx
xor bx,bx
mov cx,0001
mov dx,0080
mov ax,0301
int 13
int 20Press <Enter> to exit assembly mode, take a deep breath - and press "g" to execute, then "q" to quit "debug". Your HD is now in a virgin state, and ready for partitioning and installation.
Ran through that and was able to create a partition...
jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-27, 01:46:It's too big for the fdisk that came with Windows 98. You can find a patched fdisk that MS released later. Or, use another partitioning utility, such as a Linux live CD.
after it scanned the disk, fdisk show the max size as 12624 MB, so maybe that is what you were referring to?
12GB. What needs more erasure beyond the 512byte, 512byte is only a sector. 😀
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
According to https://www.asus.com/supportonly/A7V(MB)/HelpDesk_BIOS/ , A7V BIOS version 1011 introduced support for 48-bit LBA (at least that's what I imagine "Support 48-bit HDD." means) and the manual mentions 28-bit LBA, so 127GB or less should work out of the box and more than 127GB should work with BIOS 1011 or higher .
You are likely hitting this issue .
"Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB"
https://web.archive.org/web/20080221045037/ht … t.com/kb/263044
EDIT : If you want to use the fixed version for the KB article, just download the EXE file appropriate for your locale, unzip using 7zip (or whatever you prefer), rename either fdisk.98g (Windows 98 first edition) or fdisk.98s (second edition) to fdisk.exe and use that on your diskette .
EDIT2 : Format will display erroneous information while formatting, but will still format correctly .
See https://web.archive.org/web/20080305070530/ht … t.com/kb/263045
Thanks darry, will check it out!
