Scandisk? The command line Scandisk? If so, these are all 16 bit applications. 2^16=65536. There is your limit under DOS.

Also, guess what? I've got a video about this 🤣

Windows 98 Hard Drive Limit 127 GB 128 GB 137 GB

How people specify storage size is a mess. Currently 128 MiB is the "proper" way. 137 GB is what the hard drive manufacturers like to use.

There is another way of setting your drive, take a 2TB drive, SATA to IDE adapter, enter BIOS, auto detect and it will detect is as 137GB, often the max. capacity older BIOS support (Slot 1 for example).

FDISK, Format and there you go: You got yourself the max capacity.

What I do now is slightly different, I use SeaTools and go with either 32 GB option, or manually set 60 or 120 GB, leaving a bit of a "buffer" so to speak.

The 60 GB option is perfect if you're doing a lot with DOS and want to use DOS tools and correct reporting of space. 120 GB is now my choice for any Windows 98 machine.

So any drives larger than 2^16 bytes > Stay away from any storage related DOS tools, and do it all under Windows 98.

Partition Size has nothing to do with win9x's 128GB limitation.
Its limit happens because unpatched win9x only use 28 bits LBA addressing when accessing HDD,
so win9x only access the first 2^28 sectors in said HDD, which effectively gives 128GB limit as its symtomps.

1G in 2^30

Theres patch to allow win9x to properly access all LBA addressing bits.

A few links for you
SCANDISK and DEFRAG
48-bit LBA patch
FDISK and FORMAT

Be very careful with this patch:

NEW WINDOWS INSTALLATIONS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you are doing a clean install of Windows on a Computer where any of the d […]
Show full quote

NEW WINDOWS INSTALLATIONS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you are doing a clean install of Windows on a Computer where any of the
drives has a partition extending above the 137 GB limit, you must install the
patched ESDI_506.PDR before Windows has a chance to use its unpatched driver.
Corruption may occur before you can complete the installation otherwise.
If the Windows partition itself is above the 137 Gb limit, it will DEFINTELY
CRASH!

If you need lots of storage in Windows 98 use a network drive. I'm connecting to a 4 TB array which has all drivers, demos, benchmarks, CD images and so on.

Well sometimes it takes writing it all out in order to find the answer. After I reread my post for errors I started thinking more about the cluster number and it led me to this https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc938432.aspx so instead of looking at partition sixe I should have been looking at number of clusters. The maximum number of clusters officially supported in FAT32 is 4,177,918 according to that link. That may or may not be correct today but it is period correct back then. I am willing to bet that will fix the Scandisk error.

So 4,177,918 clusters * 32kb cluster size (32768) / 1024 / 1024 /1024 = 127.49GB which is pretty close to what Microsoft says on the same page at 127.53GB

I am willing to bet that 127GB will make Scandisk work correctly 'if' Microsoft programmed it to work with 4,177,918 clusters.

Phil,

I'll check out your vid. Scandisk is both a Windows and a DOS utility. I was referring to the Windows utility. Like right clicking a drive and going to tools to check it is consistent like after a power outage.

edit: others, 🤣 I was looking at page and writing and posted replay before I saw your posts. Oh well it always happens to me.

You can just make a small 10GB partition, install Windows, patch it, then PartitionMagic/GParted your way to happiness.
Though I agree... Windows 98 SE still supports modern enough network protocols to access even Windows 10 folders (you'll need a DSCLIENT update and these settings) without disabling any security features.

squareguy - check the links. The Windows ME version is supposed to handle bigger disks better.

I used the exact same number of sectors, and ran Windows "Check Disk" and it was fine. I only did the quick run though, but don't expect any issues as everything is within the limits of what Microsoft documents.

But just to be safe I've been going with 120 GB for a while 😀

Thanks for the links but I prefer to run Vanilla Windows 98 SE and not a Frankenstein / Hybris with parts of other OS's. It's just how I want to run my system. The only update to Windows 98 SE I am using at the moment is DirectX 7.0a and Windows Installer 2.0. Well... and the updated FDISK.

You can also disable SCANDISK in MSDOS.SYS (so it won't run after an incorrect shutdown) and use something like Norton Disk Doctor instead. But apart from that, you pretty much hit the wall if the 127GB works correctly.

Thanks Alexanrs,

I will hopefully find out tomorrow if it solves it. I bet it will. Now once I sort out this damn Sound Blaster Live I will be all set. I now remember why I tossed my Live all those years ago and got a Santa Cruz. I really hate that Live card but I want to try SF2 support and I need something that can do Digital CD Audio...

I set sectors to 127GB (binary) which gave me 4,160,318 32kb clusters.

Everything including Scandisk is working correctly.

So, just to be clear, Win98 can't see more than 128 GB of space on a physical device, regardless of how many partitions you carve it up into or how small those partitions are? It can only see the first 128 gigs' worth of partitions?

Also, some sources say that for Win98 to use a 128 GB partition, you need to create that partition using some third-party tool, or a disk for a later version of Windows. What's the biggest partition that can be created using only the tools on the Win98SE disk?