Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)
I bought a new IDE (also called PATA) hard drive on ebay. It's a white
label drive, model WL120PATA872. I;m beginning to think it's defective. I have never had all this trouble partitioning and formatting a hard drive. Part of the problem is that it has TWO sets of jumper settings on the label. One says "16 heads". The other says "32gb Clip". Both are different for the jumpers. I have it on the first IDE cable connector, (as a slave or second drive). My boot drive is on the second or end of cable connector. (Thats how it's supposed to be). Just for the heck of it, I reversed the connectors. I cant even get Dos to boot, so I cant run Fdisk on it. But I'm not sure which jumper setting to use. Anyone know? Being a slave, I know not to use the MASTER setting. For the heck of it, I put my USB to HDD cables on it, and plugged it into my XP machine. I loaded Partition Magic and that program is giving me errors too. (Normally a great program). If I at least know which jumper settings to use, that really would help. If that dont do it, the drive must be bad. |
Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)
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Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)
On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 18:08:04 GMT, Donald G. Davis
wrote: writes: Strange enough, since this drive is giving me grief, I grabbed a 160gb drive, and had it connected and partitioned in minutes. I really did not think that would work, because I was told that Win98 can not use any drive larger than 120gb. The partitions add up to 131gb after I formatted them. So, apparently there is some wasted space, but that drive works fine. Win98 doesn't handle *partitions* larger than 128 GB. If you keep partitions smaller than that--formatted as FAT16 and/or FAT32--Win98 will work with larger drives. I have a 500 GB IDE drive partitioned in that manner, and it works quite well under Win98. --Donald Davis In that case, I'm good. I always make at least 3 partitions on all larger drives. I split that one into roughly 40-35-25 %. And all along I thought I was limited to my two 120gb drives. I do wonder if the bios on this 17 year old computer could handle a 500gb drive though??? |
Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)
Seems there's some basic info needed here.
Between 1997 and 2001, there were lots of changes to motherboard BIOS in terms of how they handled IDE hard drive addressing and drive-size limits. It could very well be possible that the OP's motherboard bios is not capable of handling a drive-size larger than 8 gb. There are a few other sizes larger than this that could also be the limit if I recall, could be 12 - 16 gb. Lookup "48-bit LBA". They say this came out in 2003 but I think it came out a year or two earlier, or at least a lot of motherboards made in 2001 or 2002 could have their bios flashed to 48-bit LBA. I know there were some motherboards made in 1998 or 1999 that could handle (with a bios upgrade) 80 gb drives but nothing higher. These are boards with Pentium 2 or Pentium 3 CPU's (the vertical cartridge-looking format). Motherboards that are 48-bit LBA compliant can handle IDE drives (and SATA drives) up to 2tb in size. The "normal" limit for win-98 in terms of hard drive size is 128 gb (or 137 billion bytes). Doesn't matter how you partition this. The drive can't be larger than 137 billion bytes (I'll just call this 137 gb). The reason is the 32-bit protected-mode driver ESDI_506.PDR. Now, for some chipsets there is something called the Intel Application Accelerator package that comes with a replacement for ESDI_506.PDR that allows the use of larger IDE drives. While there were IDE drives in such sizes as 320 and 500 gb, they weren't around for long. SATA had pretty much replaced IDE by then. There really weren't many IDE drives between 80 and 320 gb in size. Maybe 160 gb. 80 gb is a very common drive size for win-98 installed on systems with Pentium-4 (socket 478) CPU's. If you have a motherboard with SATA ports, or add-on SATA card, then you can have up to 2 TB SATA drives on win-98. This requires that there is a 32-bit driver for the SATA controller - which there are when it comes to SATA-I. SATA II and higher never had win-9x drivers. I'm typing this on a win-98 system with a 750 GB and 1.5 TB SATA hard drives, both formatted as single-partition FAT32 and both are fully functional under windows 98. The motherboard is a Pentium 4, 2.5 ghz circa 2003. (I also have 2 gb of ram, fully accessible to win-98, but that's another story...) |
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