[Mijzelf]

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If I install the patch on my computer, Hard disks drives are forced into DOS-compatibility mode.

You say 'if'. Does that mean that when you reverse the installation, the harddrive works OK? I'd expect the patched ESDI_506.pdr to be corrupted somehow, or the wrong version.
The compatibility modus is forced when windows decides that it has no appropriate drivers for the drive, which happens when the device is not recognized, or when the proper driver is unavailable (by corruption for instance).

[Fredledingue]

Yes, when I restore the original ESDI_506.pdr, the drive(s) work(s) OK.
I'v tried to one in LLMX's zip file (Mistakingingly the 22226 version, then 22225.), MDGx's installer and Gape's uSP2 and 3. All put my drives on DOS-compatibility mode. I have this problem since uSP2 was realeased. That's the only file that doesn't fit on my computer.

I have a WD 120 GB (real: 111Gb). Before, I had a second 40 Gb drive that is removed now.

I'm doing a test with HDINFO, right now to see if my BIOS and MoBo are compatible...

Currently the BIOS shows for the drive LBA: ON and 32-bits: ON. It doesn't mention anything about 48-bits.
The MoBo is 5 years old.

[Fredledingue]

I mounted the new WD 400Gb drive into the case and set it as primary slave. The primary master is a WD 120 Gb.

The BIOS detects the new drive but displays for it a capacity of 136.9 Gb only.

Then, I restarted windows.
Windows Explorer doesn't see the drive (maybe because it's not formatted - but how do I format a drive that windows doesn't see? I hope to find the solution here, on WD website - ).
In the Device Manager, however, it seems to be there because there are two "generic IDE drive TYPE 47". If there is only one hard disc installed there should be only one, I think.

Then I ran HDINFO. ===> Surprise!
The primary master (the 120 Gb drive) doesn't support 48-bits LBA (and supports everything else)
The primary slave (the new 400 Gb drive) supports 48-bits LBA and displays a capacity of 400 Gb (contrary to BIOS)!

Then I ran 48LbaChk under plain DOS
===> Second surprise!
It says "Your BIOS appears to be 48-bits LBA capable and you have a drive larger than 137 Gb installed".
Which is good news.

Yet, the problems remain that the BIOS doesn't see more than 136.9 Gb, Windows doesn't see it at all and the ESDI_506.pdr patch still set drive C in compatibility mode.

I'm a little bit confused with all these conflicting informations...

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 29 December 2007 - 02:00 PM

[Mijzelf]

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Windows Explorer doesn't see the drive (maybe because it's not formatted - but how do I format a drive that windows doesn't see? - ).

You'll have to partition it. Explorer will only see a *partition* it recognizes. Windows has recognized it, as it sees 2 harddisks.

[Fredledingue]

I applied r.Loew patch and... it works!

I was able to partition the new drive up to 143 Gb (Windows sees it with that much free space) with WD's Datas Lifeguard (utility from WD's website).
Something impossible before applying r.Loew's patch.
Now, I didn't try to fill the drive with 143 Gb of datas, but the fact that windows sees it as a 143 Gb drive is very promising.
(It's just a little bit silly to limit the demo version to 145 Gb because it's unclear whether you effectively broke the 137 Gb barrier if you or the partition utility counts 1 gigabites as 1,024 Mb or as 1,000 Mb, as 1,073,741,824 bytes or 1000,000,000 bytes an so on. One way you are under 137Gb "real", the other way you are not. )

The problem with the ESDI_506.pdr patch from LLMX, is that the Device Manager doesn't see any of the hard drive.
Datas Lifeguard, which allows you to format and partition the drive, doesn't detect the drive as a WD one when the patch is installed. Both Device Manager and Datas Lifeguard detect the drive normaly when the original pdr file is restored. But in this case, Datas Lifeguard won't let me use more than 137 Gb.

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 29 December 2007 - 01:59 PM

[briton]

Fredledingue, on Dec 29 2007, 11:37 AM, said:

I'v tried to one in LLMX's zip file (Mistakingingly the 22226 version, then 22225.)

So you have an IBM laptop? Doesn't seem likely! You probably need 22, not 25. Check the original file version number.

You might want to have a look at the thread for the Win98SE Autopatcher (under Unofficial Service Pack on this site).

Have you tried manually setting BIOS hard drive info based on WD literature?

This post has been edited by briton: 30 December 2007 - 08:21 PM

[Fredledingue]

Hi Briton.

I'v read everywhere that the 22226 is for IBM laptops and that the 22225 is for all other PC.
Moreover I'v applied the patch through installing MDGx's installer and also Gape's uSP.
It would be surprising that two w98 Gods ( ) made the same mistake by placing a wrong file in their installer and that by an incredible luck these wrong files work on most computers except mine.

But since there is version 222222 around, I'm going to test it, just in case I'm lucky. Maybe you are the right guy after all... Otherwise I'll lay $10 for Loew's path. That's not the end of the world.

Happy New Year!

[submix8c]

Huh! (repeating myself...)

Reckon if R.Loew has a viable patch that's a vast improvement in lieu of LLXX' patch, it would be soooo nice if he would just "give it up" instead of charging for a patch to an "obsolete" OS. Granted, there a quite a number of persons still using the "obsolete" OS, but, c'mon, wouldn't it be better (from a marketing point of view; he got "yelled at" for doing that in MSFN) to just "release" it openly and try to gain a name for being good at what he does, then go on to more profitable (read $$$ instead of $) ventures?

Not knocking your rationale; you do need a "proper" fix if your gonna use a 137gb+ HDD... just seems kinda way too capitalistic.

Let us know how popping that $10 works...

[briton]

Fredledingue, on Jan 2 2008, 07:44 PM, said:

Hi Briton.

I'v read everywhere that the 22226 is for IBM laptops and that the 22225 is for all other PC.
Moreover I'v applied the patch through installing MDGx's installer and also Gape's uSP.
It would be surprising that two w98 Gods ( ) made the same mistake by placing a wrong file in their installer and that by an incredible luck these wrong files work on most computers except mine.

But since there is version 222222 around, I'm going to test it, just in case I'm lucky. Maybe you are the right guy after all... Otherwise I'll lay $10 for Loew's path. That's not the end of the world.

Happy New Year!

Sorry - I checked my own versions to see what I did. My oh my that sticky needs relabelling lol

My mistake. Here is how I have them labelled for the boxes I use them on:

4102222F Older Desktop PC Win98SE.ZIP
4102225F Desktop PC Win98SE.ZIP
4102226F IBM laptop v4.10.2226 of PDR file only.ZIP
4903000F WinMe.ZIP

If I remember correctly, the advice I was given on the board was that I should match the installed version number. Did you actually check what file version your installation disk installs?

So you are correct - 26 is for IBM laptop.

(As for the $10 - small price to pay for someone else to do the brainwork! Some go open, some ask for donations. It's up to the owner of the intellectual property rights!)

This post has been edited by briton: 05 January 2008 - 04:50 AM

[Fredledingue]

So 22 is for older desktop PC. Maybe I should install the one for older PC?
Now I'm a little bit at loss how to proceed after I installed Lowe's patch to test another patch. I'v started to use the HD and don't ant to erase everything now.
Can I change the vxd back and forth file and continue with the current HD drive partition (144 Gb) and content?

About the $10, I would be glad to give them to him if that's the solution I need in my case. The problem is more the hassle of moving my derriere to make the payment. It's never clear whether my pay-pal payments are accepted.

[awergh]

im just wanting some confirmation, i just installed 98se and usp3, drivers and stuff, and i installed 48BITLBA and intel application accelerator and on a 40gb disk then ghosted it to a 160gb disk and ran the 160gb disk and i filled it up using MAKE2GB from COPY2GB i filled the disk to 149GB its not really 160GB oh well so i have 139mb left and windows still boots so i can assume i didnt have any problems with 48bitlba?

[Fredledingue]

Hard Drive manufacturers are all cheating about the number of Gb. They say 160 Gb while it's infact 160 billions of bytes.
160 000 000 000b is 149 GB indeed. ((160 000 000 000/1024)/1024)/1024 = 149
So it's normal.

Download Dingue Calculator on my website (signature). I included a data unit convertor...

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 10 January 2008 - 02:25 PM

[Mijzelf]

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Hard Drive manufacturers are all cheating.

No they're not. A 160 GB disk should be able to store 160 * 10⁹ bytes. This equals to 149 GiB which is 149 * 2³⁰. This is convented by the IEC in 1999.

@awergh:
Theoretically your test is not rock solid. There could be corruption which do not stop Windows from booting. Since you've passed the 128 GiB limit with 32 GiB, about 25% of the disk should be currupted when the patch doesn't work.
I *think* you're safe, since I can't imagine that windows would not give a single complain with such a corruption, but it *is* possible. LLXX advices that you should test the disk integrety with scandisk, after having filled it with data. You should *not* use W98 scandisk, which can corrupt partitions bigger than 127 GiB, but WinME scandisk, or some 3th party scanner. In any case it's recommended to exchange scandisk and defrag with the WinME versions, when using partitions >127 GiB, as you can read earlier in this thread.

[awergh]

my though about 149gb instead of 160gb was that Seagate got sued recently, but maybe they havent put the right amounts yet.

well i did have a bsod about vmm or something recently so im not sure i re cloned the drive from the 40gb, and i decided to do what i intend which is 120gb partion and 29gb for other os or something, but im only at 9gb full of 20gb because i decided not to use MAKE2GB for some reason

[Fredledingue]

IMO, it's safest to divide the drive into 127GB partitions in case you reinstal windows and forget to update defrag and scandisk to ME.

160Gb vs 149Gb: Maybe it's legal, yet it's not honest. The bigger the drives are the bigger the difference and the disapointment of the poeple.

[Mijzelf]

Quote

160Gb vs 149Gb: Maybe it's legal, yet it's not honest.

That's true. In this case Windows is wrong. It should not mention the disk as 149GB, but 149GiB. On the other hand, W98 is older than the '99 IEC convention, so how could it conform? On the third hand, AFAIK Vista still does it wrong.

[awergh]

i gave up and decided only to partition 120gb and leave the 29gb to do nothing, what do ytou mean vista does it wrong afaik all OSs treat a GB as 1024MB

[Mijzelf]

Quote

what do ytou mean vista does it wrong afaik all OSs treat a GB as 1024MB

Well, this is going slightly off-topic. You will know that 1 kB is not 1000 bytes but 1024. Yet the 'k' prefix means 1000. In 'binary environments' it was practise to use the 'k' prefix for 1024, because it's easy, it was relatively accurate (only 2.4% wrong), and there was no other prefix available. But memory and disks became bigger. the difference between a 'real' MB and a 'practical' MB is almost 5%, for GB this is 7.3%, and for TB this will be 10%. Your brandnew 1TB disk will be 100GB too small! As Fredledingue stated: 'The bigger the drives are the bigger the difference'. And the 'binary environment' became less well defined. The decimal and binary prefixes became mixed. In earlier days I had an 14k4 modem, which could handle a full duplex 14400 bits/second. In this case a 'k' is obviously 1000. Why? Isn't is a 'binary device'? What about my 4Mb broadband? It turns out to be 4000000b. But the upload is 1Mb, which is 1048576b. Did you know that the 1.44MB floppy size is 1.44 * 1024 * 1000 bytes?
So this practise became inconvenient. For this reason the IEC introduced the binary prefixes Ki, Mi, Gi, ...
The harddisk manufacturers are right when they sell you a 160GB harddisk which can contain 160000000000 bytes. They are using an international standard. It would be nice if they sold you a 149GiB disk, but as long as their competitors don't, they cannot do that.
Vista (and all OSs) should use the right prefix. Using standards in a wrong way is confusing and error prone.

[Fredledingue]

First time I read about GiB, KiB etc... eventhought the convention was created in 1999.
Why no one ever used it? Why M$ never made a patch to diplay GiB instaed of GB, starting from w98se?
Maybe to maintain the confusion about data tranfer speed and storage. I maintain this confusion is intentional.

I also wonder why hard drive manufacturers never do 160 GiB HD, and do only 160 GB...
After a Vista OS installatiom, a 160 GB has only 134 GiB of storage left.
I wonder how many consumer complained that they didn't have the right HD in their new computer...

[xrayer]

Mijzelf, on Jan 12 2008, 03:06 PM, said:

Did you know that the 1.44MB floppy size is 1.44 * 1024 * 1000 bytes?

I think foppy size is derived from its physical geometry, so you should write 80*18*2*512 = 1474560 instead
meaningless 1.44*1024*1000 even if the result is same.
Anyway I don't bother about MB and MiB, it's not serious difference compared e.g. to nowdays HDD sizes.
From your experience you will know where is used MiBs and MBs. But sometimes I wonder too, e.g. I would expect that
CF card will use MiBs because it contains flash chips which are surely 2^N sized but they probably save this capacity
for badblock relocation and other hidden storage for CF controller.