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Old December 20th 07, 09:16 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.disks.general,microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Jeffery
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Posts: 2
Default 250 GB drives - please help

Do you have or know where I can get a system disk from. I deleted win 95
uning the format hard drive. My computer is now telling me that a system
disk is nrrded.

"Eric Gisin" wrote:

"98 Guy" wrote in message ...

First, understand that there are 2 scandisk's. One is the DOS
scandisk (scandisk.exe) and the second is Windows scandisk
(scandskw.exe + diskmaint.dll). Then there is defrag (AKA windows
defrag).

The windows scandisk and defrag have problems when the number of
allocation units (AKA clusters) exceeds a certain number (I think it's
4 million but it could be 6 or 8 million). The windows ME versions of
scandisk and defrag have a higher limit (and most people recommend you
use them on your win-98 system for other reasons anyways).

Win 98 GUI scandisk and defrag are 16-bit, and limited to 16MB.
The FAT has to be resident, so the cluster limit is under 4M.
I don't know about Win ME. You could look up the MS KB article on these.
This topic was discussed 5 years ago, google groups has it.

The DOS version of scandisk (the one that sometimes runs at startup
when a bad shutdown was detected) actually doesn't have a limit from
my own tests, so it's quite robust in that regard.

The idiot (Rod) is claiming there is some other issue regarding large
hard drives and win-98, but he refuses to describe it.

The obvious problem is the MS IDE drive is not LBA-48,
so 128GB is a hard limit unless there is an alt driver available.

And by the way, you don't need PM to prepare a large hard drive for
win-98. What you need is simply the updated version of fdisk.exe (may
2000 I think). It will correctly partition a large drive (250 gb or
larger) and then you use format.com to format it.

Correct, or you could use freeDOS fdisk.