At this time Windows 98 / 98 SE does not natively support 137GB drives. However, there are some 3rd party utilities that will allow you to see the full capacity of the drive once the operating system has been installed (no support for installing to a full size partition).

Software Driver Updates (800 Series Intel Chipsets Only)

The Intel Application Accelerator (IAA) adds 48-bit LBA support for the 800 series Intel chipsets.

Software Driver Updates (Non-Intel Chipsets)

VIA has drivers which support 48-bit LBA for their chipsets.

Scandisk

The version of Scandisk that comes with Windows 98 / 98 SE does not support partitions larger than 137 GB.

What if say for instance you had a 160GB drive split up into 2x 80GB partitions...would that work? Or is strictly the physical size of the hard drive (regardless of size and number of partitions) that is the problem?

It's a disk size issue, not partition. You need more than 40 bits (hence the new 48 bit LBA) to address the part over 137GB (128 "real" GB) of the disk.

There is a patch for this issue. But it's not free: High Capacity Disk Patch

Correction: it's free only up to 145GB. If you want to get more space out of your 160GB or larger drive, you must then pay.

I have written a Patch for Windows 98/98SE/ME that can be installed duirng installation of Windows, so Windows can be installed on a partition above the 137GB limit. It could be installed on a full size partition, but SCANDISK and DEFRAG will not work. The Patch works with all chipsets tested so far.

Intel has not upgraded it's IAA Software to support the newer chipsets.

The VIA Drives you mentioned only works on some Chipsets and has a Bug that can affect some Hard Drives.

I have not seen any Drivers or Patches for other Chipsets such as the NVidia Chipsets.

Rudolph R. Loew

http://www.geocities.com/rloew

The version of Scandisk that comes with Windows 98 / 98 SE does not support partitions larger than 137 GB.

You say it does not support partitions larger than 137 GB. Is this because SCANDISK uses less than 48 bits internally regardless of whether your hard disk controller driver supports 48-bit LBA? Suppose I have a special driver for my hard disk controller (not ESDI_506.PDR), I have a hard disk of 200 GB, and a partition of 136 GB near the end of the disk, then do you think it will work fine because the partition is less than 137 GB? But if the partition were 138 GB then something bad would happen? I am asking a lot of questions only because I have a setup similar to this and these problems are scary

It could be installed on a full size partition, but SCANDISK and DEFRAG will not work.

Does ME SCANDISK and DEFRAG also have this problem? I'm guessing the answer is yes...

It's hard to live without scandisk and defrag tools. Maybe Tihiy's scandisk and an alternative to defrag such as Executive Diskeeper will suffice for those who want to have partitions larger than 137 GB.

The VIA Drives you mentioned only works on some Chipsets and has a Bug that can affect some Hard Drives.

What is the bug? I would be reluctant to change drivers because the VIA IDE Miniport driver lets me use my UltraATA 100 hard disks at full speed.

Not Diskeeper. I have just stupidely tested defragmenting a 233 GB SATA drive with 190 GB of data on it under Win ME with Diskeeper Lite 6 and the result is widespread damage on the data. Then Scandisk only badly corrected (did further damage) five errors before throwing out "out of memory error messages. Never had any sort of problems problem with Diskeeper or scandisk on small volumes.

PS : I lost only about a few thousands out of hundreds of thousands files. Mostly but not exclusively files very recently added to the volume. No file has apparently disappeared nor any absurd directories or files appeared but damaged files have a slightly wrong size and are often damaged even in the first cluster and always totally wrong in the following ones. They can't be copied to other volumes with normal copy tools nor can they be deleted and the recovery software I have tried to use (Drive Rescue, Unstoppable Copier, Restoration) recovered exclusively corrupted files. The only type of damaged files I have managed to sort of recover are small ASCII files as they tolerate small errors that binaries can't.

Dear azaqahl,

SCANDISK does not know or care about 48-Bit LBA. It's limitation appears to be an issue with memory allocation. It's limit is actually 500MB below the 137GB limit. Some people have reported limits as low as 64GB. Upgrading or replacing your ESDI_506.PDR will not help. Even using a PCI Card or an external USB drive will not help. The only good news is that the Windows version of SCANDISK will fail immediately without doing any damage. The same for DEFRAG.
This might not be true for third party SCANDISK and DEFRAG programs. The Windows ME versions are not any better. If your hard disk controller driver supports 48-Bit LBA you can place a 136GB partition anywhere on the hard drive you want.

I haven't seen Tihiy's SCANDISK so I cannot comment on it. I haven't tried Diskeeper but you may want to look at my response to Eidenk later in this post.

DOS SCANDISK will work with larger partitions PROVIDED that the BIOS supports 48-Bit LBA. Performing SCANDISK in DOS on a system, who's BIOS does not support 48-Bit LBA, whether voluntarily or as a result of a bad shutdown, virtually guarantees corruption. This is true regardless of the partition sizes if any data is written past 137GB on the physical drive.

The VIA driver is not compliant with the ATA-7 Specification. A drive that is compliant with the specification will appear to have a read/write error when a specific sector is requested. Since the sector can be accessed in more than one way, the error may seem intermittent. I have seen this problem on Seagate drives and there may be others. I have written a Patch for the VIA driver but have not advertised it on my website since no one has shown an interest so far.



Dear Eidenk,

Did you upgrade Windows ME to support 48-Bit LBA (Patch, IAA, VIA, PCI Card, etc.)?

If you were in Safe Mode, does your BIOS support 48-Bit LBA?

If so, then Diskeeper may have a serious flaw.

One corrupted, recovery of the lost or damaged data is usually very difficult. I am not surprised that your attempts at recovery have had poor results. Recovery software is somewhat effective in recovering deleted files on a partition that is not significantly fragmented, but not good for much else. A recovery expert is usually required to recover much from this type of corruption.


Rudolph R. Loew

http://www.geocities.com/rloew