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Large Hard Drive on Promise Card Doesn't Work
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 |
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