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Old October 16th 17, 03:04 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy[_5_]
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Posts: 34
Default 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...)