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Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)



 
 
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  #1  
Old October 15th 17, 05:38 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Posts: 21
Default 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.


  #2  
Old October 15th 17, 09:09 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
JJ[_2_]
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Posts: 36
Default Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 23:38:31 -0500, wrote:

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.


Neither of those two jumpers is for configuring the HDD master-slave mode.

That "16 heads" jumper is for changing the drive geometry. It's for use on
UNIX systems.

The "32gb Clip" jumper is for limitting the drive capacity. For BIOSes that
don't support large capacity drive.

For HDDs without master-slave jumper, it could either mean that the mode
would be defined by the IDE cable plug - like shown on below pictures.

http://www.asrock.com/support/faq/20061020-01.jpg

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/img/16837_ide-cable.gif

http://www.frontx.com/pro/c203_018p2.gif

http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/1304159566.or.33063.gif

Or, the mode will be auto selected.

Or, it can only run in master mode.
  #3  
Old October 15th 17, 10:19 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Posts: 21
Default Confusing Hard Drive jumpers (PATA or IDE)

On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 15:09:41 +0700, JJ wrote:

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 23:38:31 -0500, wrote:

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.


Neither of those two jumpers is for configuring the HDD master-slave mode.

That "16 heads" jumper is for changing the drive geometry. It's for use on
UNIX systems.

The "32gb Clip" jumper is for limitting the drive capacity. For BIOSes that
don't support large capacity drive.

For HDDs without master-slave jumper, it could either mean that the mode
would be defined by the IDE cable plug - like shown on below pictures.

http://www.asrock.com/support/faq/20061020-01.jpg

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/img/16837_ide-cable.gif

http://www.frontx.com/pro/c203_018p2.gif

http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/1304159566.or.33063.gif

Or, the mode will be auto selected.

Or, it can only run in master mode.


I do have the cable installed right. My cable is the old style 40 wire
one, but that came with this 17 year old computer. Oddly enough, I did
have the cable backwards on the original drives (Master/Slave), and it
still worked fine. It's probably been that way for years. There is a
jumper setting marked "Cable Select". If that dont work, I guess this
drive can only be used as a master, or it's defective.

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.

If I can only make this drive a master, I have a bigger problem. My
floppy drive has died. It's been years since I used it, and it must have
died from no use. This computer cant boot from USB, and dont have a
CDrom drive. So, if I must make a Master HDD, I will have to buy a new
floppy drive first.




  #4  
Old October 15th 17, 10:32 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Posts: 21
Default 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???

  #5  
Old October 16th 17, 03:04 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy[_5_]
external usenet poster
 
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...)
 




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