-Win9x has problems using more than 137gb on a single HDD. Those problems can be somewhat overcome with patches and drivers. Additionally fdisk has problems with creating/formatting drives larger than 32(?)gb. There are alternavties to fdisk and patches for fdisk to solve this problem.

-Older IDE controllers can not use drives larger than 137gb. Afaik there's no fix for that.

Both are the same size limitation but as far as I understand for different reasons. Still this creates confusion.

If your drive controller supports drives larger than 137gb there shouldn't be a problem with creating a single 137gb partition on a drive and installing Win98 on it.

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-04-07, 21:44:

If your drive controller supports drives larger than 137gb there shouldn't be a problem with creating a single 137gb partition on a drive and installing Win98 on it.

It definitely does afaik- my ECS K7S5A supports up to 250gb hdd's on 'newer' bios- and it has that bios.

So it seems like it's just a question of what will happen with win9x- and I guess if it's working so far, it should keep working...(?)

If your BIOS see's HD fine the only issue you may run into is the 137Gb Win98SE max where it could start overwriting files or mess with the boot sector if you do not patch 98SE with the large drive fix .
If it were me would make a 120GB C boot partition and then make the rest D drive but you may want to patch 98SE instead of remaking the partitions.
About the native 128GB (~137Gb) max of Win98SE from Phils: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh6j5tW0iwU and this topic:
About max size and patch files: Hard drive and partition sizes in Windows 98 SE

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-04-07, 21:44:

-Win9x has problems using more than 137gb on a single HDD. Those problems can be somewhat overcome with patches and drivers. Add […]
Show full quote

-Win9x has problems using more than 137gb on a single HDD. Those problems can be somewhat overcome with patches and drivers. Additionally fdisk has problems with creating/formatting drives larger than 32(?)gb. There are alternavties to fdisk and patches for fdisk to solve this problem.

-Older IDE controllers can not use drives larger than 137gb. Afaik there's no fix for that.

Both are the same size limitation but as far as I understand for different reasons. Still this creates confusion.

If your drive controller supports drives larger than 137gb there shouldn't be a problem with creating a single 137gb partition on a drive and installing Win98 on it.

fdisk doesn't have a problem with formatting or partitioning large hard drives, it just misreports the capacity. I have always used the version of fdisk on the windows 98 CD and it works fine. Once you get in windows the capacity is reported correctly.

Given windows 98 LBA limitation, you are just waiting for windows 98 to wrap around its address space and override your data or the boot sector. You can patch it, apparently, but I prefer to leave windows 98 unpatched and work within its limitations.

Even for much smaller drives I prefer to give windows a smaller partition. Typically 4GB but no greater then 40.
Benefits are.
Scandisk doesn't take an age if windows isn't shut down properly.
If Windows commits suicide for whatever reason I can simply format C:\ and reinstall with all my games, ISO's, etc safely on D:\
Usually I have a 3rd "recovery" partition with a copy of the windows install files, drivers, etc.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-08, 10:07:

Even for much smaller drives I prefer to give windows a smaller partition. Typically 4GB but no greater then 40. Benefits are. S […]
Show full quote

Even for much smaller drives I prefer to give windows a smaller partition. Typically 4GB but no greater then 40.
Benefits are.
Scandisk doesn't take an age if windows isn't shut down properly.
If Windows commits suicide for whatever reason I can simply format C:\ and reinstall with all my games, ISO's, etc safely on D:\
Usually I have a 3rd "recovery" partition with a copy of the windows install files, drivers, etc.

I think this is great advice. I'm going to return the 250gb used hdd and get a couple 20 or 40gb ide drives that I can partition a few times for OS, recovery partition, and maybe even a dos partition if I ever build a retro system with an ISA slot motherboard... because exactly what I needed was an excuse to build yet another system on top of my totally overkill three 98se builds (a 775 p4 that goes vroom with agp 8x and gf4, a p4 agp 2x compatible board for voodoo, and socket a agp2x for voodoo).