Its complaining about a 40 wire ide ribbon cable, not connector. The 40 and
80 wire versions both have the same amount of female connectors. The extra
40 wires serves to do a number of things, primarily reduce crosstalk between
the wires. And that's probably exactly what you're getting at faster
speeds, crosstalk. Use of an 80 wire ide ribbon cable is highly recommended
for replacement whether for fast hard drive etc. or for onboard ide devices
that are working okay now.

You can partition the 250GB with a number of 3rd party partitioning
programs, including one available from the manufacturer. These will allow
full partitioning of the entire hard disk. This is assuming your bios is 48
bit lba capable. In the end, you can only store 128GB of data on the hard
drive before data corruption results. This a problem with Win98/98SE. Not
partitioning or a bios problem. Due to this, a 120GB hard drive is the
largest capacity available in today's market that can be fully utilized by
Win98 for file storage.

--
Jonny
"Ken Dibble" wrote in message
...
I've got a 250 GB IDE HDD formatted with one primary DOS partition
under FAT32 to 128 GB (more or less). This is not my C: drive, it's
actually the third physical hard drive in my system; it's an add-on
for extra storage. This drive is connected via a Promise Ultra 100 TX2
PCI controller card. On boot-up the Promise card reports this drive as
DMA 2 and warns that because it's using a 40-connector cable, its
speed will drop from 66 to 33. The Promise card handles my second (40
GB) hard drive with no problems or warnings. The Promise card shows up
in the Device Manager as a SCSI device (though the two drives it
handles aren't SCSI drives).

I've upgraded the Promise card's BIOS and driver to the latest
versions for Win 98--or at least I think I have. There are no actual
instructions that come with the download for the Promise card. There
are a bunch of .vxd driver files, an .inf file, and an .exe file that,
I guess, is supposed to upgrade the BIOS. There's also an autoexec.bat
file with a line calling the same .exe file. I'm not about to replace
my existing autoexec.bat file, which contains a bunch of stuff, with
the one line in the Promise file. I could copy that one line to my
autoexec.bat file but it looks to me as though it would then reflash
the BIOS every time the computer boots. That doesn't seem right to me.
I ran the .exe file from Windows and I also tried to upgrade the
driver in the Device Manager, which informed me that I was already
using the latest version. The Promise site indicates this upgrade
should handle large drives, but I'm not entirely sure that the upgrade
"took".

Windows 98 SE is having problems with this drive. I can transfer large
multimedia files to it and they will show up as being there in Windows
Explorer but they won't play reliably. I can't move the files back off
the drive; I get an "error reading drive" message when I try. Nor can
I reliably execute other operations on large files while they reside
on this disk. I can hear the drive thrashing, over and over, as though
it's struggling to get started, as it tries to access large files. And
any time I access the drive, the next time I reboot, Windows claims
that there may be errors on the drive and runs the DOS-based
ScanDisk--the full version that does a physical check of every
cluster. If I let that run (takes several hours) the system will boot
fine, and will continue to reboot without error unless I attempt to
access the large drive again. However, it doesn't make any difference
in how the drive performs. If I try to run ScanDisk in Windows on this
drive I get a message claiming I don't have enough memory to do so. I
don't get this message if I run ScanDisk in Windows on another drive.

I've already accepted that Win 98 isn't going to handle a drive larger
than 128 GB (even though FAT32 allegedly can handle several terrabytes
of data). I'm willing to repartition and reformat the drive if
necessary. However, the version of fdisk on my Win 98 boot disk simply
can't format this drive without errors, period, and Win 98 doesn't let
me re-partition the disk.

I've tried a couple of third-party partitioning tools. So far I can't
find one that recognizes that this is a 250 GB drive. My understanding
of what I've read is that while I can't create a partition larger than
128 GB in Win 98, I should be able to create two partitions of about
125 GB each on this drive. How can I do that when no tool can see more
than 137 GB on the drive?

I assumed the IDE cable I got to connect this disk to the Promise card
was standard. It's got a standard-looking end on it. So I don't
understand why it's complaining about 40-connector vs 80-connector
issues--unless half the holes on this cable's terminals aren't
actually wired. Is there such a thing as an 80-connector IDE cable
that I can get? If so, will it solve my problem? In other words, is
this simply a speed issue?

If not, what do I need to do to fully use this drive reliably on my
Promise controller under FAT32 on a Win 98 machine?

TIA.

Ken Dibble