[Petr]

BTW, this is very nice tool: http://www.hdat2.com/
and also the User's Manual contains detail information about many things related to disks.

It also contains the statement:

Quote

Any Windows 95 version does not support disk greater than 32 GB (see KB246818)

Petr

[qazaq]

1. installed the patch
2. installed fdisk from free dos
3. installed maxtor 300gb drive
4. put more than 200gb on it
5. found the link posted by maximus-decim and installed scandisk and defrag from ME
6. ran scandisk and all was fine
7. ran defrag and all went well
everything works so far
thank you to everyone who had anything to do with this project

[LLXX]

qazaq, on Jul 23 2006, 07:05 PM, said:

1. installed the patch
2. installed fdisk from free dos
3. installed maxtor 300gb drive
4. put more than 200gb on it
5. found the link posted by maximus-decim and installed scandisk and defrag from ME
6. ran scandisk and all was fine
7. ran defrag and all went well
everything works so far
thank you to everyone who had anything to do with this project

Did you copy the files from DOS or Windows? All the copy operations must be done through the driver (disk access must not be in 16-bit "MS-DOS Compatibility Mode"). I have posted a recommended procedure a few posts previous.

[qazaq]

LLXX, on Jul 23 2006, 08:12 PM, said:

qazaq, on Jul 23 2006, 07:05 PM, said:

1. installed the patch
2. installed fdisk from free dos
3. installed maxtor 300gb drive
4. put more than 200gb on it
5. found the link posted by maximus-decim and installed scandisk and defrag from ME
6. ran scandisk and all was fine
7. ran defrag and all went well
everything works so far
thank you to everyone who had anything to do with this project

Did you copy the files from DOS or Windows? All the copy operations must be done through the driver (disk access must not be in 16-bit "MS-DOS Compatibility Mode"). I have posted a recommended procedure a few posts previous.

yes i did the file copy in dos
i used the win98 cd to boot to a c: prompt

[Petr]

qazaq, on Jul 24 2006, 02:05 AM, said:

1. installed the patch
2. installed fdisk from free dos
3. installed maxtor 300gb drive
4. put more than 200gb on it
5. found the link posted by maximus-decim and installed scandisk and defrag from ME
6. ran scandisk and all was fine
7. ran defrag and all went well
everything works so far
thank you to everyone who had anything to do with this project

Did you have one big partition or more smaller?

Windows scandisk and defrag do not work with disks bigger than 137 GB.

Petr

[LLXX]

qazaq, on Jul 23 2006, 09:48 PM, said:

yes i did the file copy in dos
i used the win98 cd to boot to a c: prompt

Wrong procedure. DOS 7.1 uses Int13x which supports 48-bit LBA. It has nothing to do with ESDI_506.PDR.

[krick]

Petr, on Jul 24 2006, 01:02 AM, said:

Windows scandisk and defrag do not work with disks bigger than 137 GB.

Petr

Just checking...

Both Windows 98SE *and* Windows ME versions of scandisk and defrag have this limitation?

[Petr]

krick, on Jul 24 2006, 05:13 PM, said:

Petr, on Jul 24 2006, 01:02 AM, said:

Windows scandisk and defrag do not work with disks bigger than 137 GB.

Petr

Just checking...

Both Windows 98SE *and* Windows ME versions of scandisk and defrag have this limitation?

Yes, if I remember correctly, both are 16-bit application that are able to allocate 64KB max. for clusters table.

Something is written here:
"Your Computer Does Not Have Enough Free Memory to Defrag the Drive" Error Message

Petr

[erpdude8]

hp38guser, on Jul 23 2006, 03:14 AM, said:

What about esdi_506.pdr included with Windows 95?

If patching is not very difficult it would be great to create also a Windows 95 patch. There might be some hobbyists still using Windows 95. Does Windows 95 support FAT32 anyway?

NO DONT MAKE PATCHES FOR WIN95! WIN95's ESDI_506.PDR FILES DO NOT SUPPORT HDDs BIGGER THAN 32 GIGS!

Everyone should be AWARE and have read MS article 246818 that Win95 can NOT support hard drives bigger than 32 gig (and they may NOT even work under Win95):
http://support.micro...b/246818/EN-US/

Bottom line, 32GB+ HDs are incompatible with Win95 and require Win98/ME or better to use.

Those "hobbyists" hp38guser mentioned are most likely very, VERY few and more & more PC users are using at least Win98 or Win2000.

LLXX, on Jul 23 2006, 04:34 AM, said:

If you could give me a link to 4.10.1119 then I'll try to fix it...

the one I have from my Win95b distro is 4.10.1111

The driver structure changed greatly between 95 and 98 (and again with ME), so this is going to take moar time to implement... but I will do it

Any test results yet?

Q176529 esdi_506.pdr v4.00.1119 hotfix for Win95 SR2 is NO longer available from Microsoft support as I was told they are no longer offering any existing Win95 hotfixes because ALL support for Win95 had ended. You wont be able to find it anywhere online.

and besides, Win95 OSes are SO last decade and so last century that adding 48bit LBA support under Win95 would also require a complete rewriting or rebuilding of Win95 (yes, even rewriting many of Win95's core system files which have a lot of missing "dependencies" that are included in Win98/Win2000 & higher) which is next to impossible. heck, even Win95's built-in INF files cant even recognize Pentium 2 or even Pentium 3 CPUs and cant work on CPUs faster than 2.1 Ghz as mentioned in MS article 312108:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312108

so LLXX, you need to concentrate on making Win98/ME OSes 48bit LBA compliant and forget about Win95.

Win95 OSes are pretty much dead and already in the afterlife.

This post has been edited by erpdude8: 24 July 2006 - 02:20 PM

[LLXX]

I've found the 4.10.1119, but now you say it's pointless to patch

Where does the 32Gb limit come from? That's 64M sectors i.e. 2^26 which doesn't look like a familiar limit.

This post has been edited by LLXX: 24 July 2006 - 02:35 PM

[qazaq]

LLXX, on Jul 24 2006, 03:17 AM, said:

qazaq, on Jul 23 2006, 09:48 PM, said:

yes i did the file copy in dos
i used the win98 cd to boot to a c: prompt

Wrong procedure. DOS 7.1 uses Int13x which supports 48-bit LBA. It has nothing to do with ESDI_506.PDR.

ok in extreme detail here is what i did
1. download 4102225F.ZIP and unzip
2. copy esdi_506.pdr to root dir of c:
3. reboot using win98 cd to plain old dos
4. dos commands as follows
cd windows
cd system
cd iosubsys
rename esdi_506.pdr esdi_506.bak
5. copy c:\esdi_506.pdr
6. shutdown
7. install 300gb drive as drive d:
8. boot to dos and fdisk drive
9. boot into windows and format drive d:
10 copy lots and lots of files to d:
11 run scandisk and it does not work
12 run defrag and it does not work
13 downloaded this
http://rapidshare.de...hdd20e.zip.html
posted by maximus-decim
Include:
esdi_506.pdr - LLXX version 4.10.2225 (up to version 4.10.2230)
defrag.exe - Windows Me
dskmaint.dll - Windows Me
scandskw.exe - Windows Me
format.exe - Free Format 0.91v
fdisk.exe - Free Fdisk 1.21
Documentations and Installation
14 installed above per documentation
15 ran scandisk and it worked
16 ran defrag and it works also

thats it all done

This post has been edited by qazaq: 24 July 2006 - 02:38 PM

[LLXX]

From your procedure above it seems like it is indeed working.

Looks like defrag from WinME does work with partitions bigger than 128Gb...

One more confirmation: I'd like a screenshot of the Properties page of the 300Gb drive being filled past 137Gb, ajacent to the information dialog from a successful scandisk'ing.

[n7Epsilon]

The 32 GB limit is due to Windows 95 non-support of FAT32 (only FAT16) and the maximum size for a FAT drive is 32 GB (using some 3rd party utilities can get a 64 GB FAT32 drive) but at that size the cluster size is 32 KB and 64 KB respectively which is ridiculously huge and causes a lot of wasted space.

[Petr]

LLXX, on Jul 24 2006, 10:41 PM, said:

From your procedure above it seems like it is indeed working.

Looks like defrag from WinME does work with partitions bigger than 128Gb...

One more confirmation: I'd like a screenshot of the Properties page of the 300Gb drive being filled past 137Gb, ajacent to the information dialog from a successful scandisk'ing.

Is this sufficient?

 hd2.gif (7.03K)
Number of downloads: 27

Surprisingly, Windows Me scandisk and defrag really works while the original Windows 98 versions not.

Petr

[qazaq]

LLXX, on Jul 24 2006, 02:41 PM, said:

From your procedure above it seems like it is indeed working.

Looks like defrag from WinME does work with partitions bigger than 128Gb...

One more confirmation: I'd like a screenshot of the Properties page of the 300Gb drive being filled past 137Gb, ajacent to the information dialog from a successful scandisk'ing.

 300GBonWin98.jpg (94.26K)
Number of downloads: 237

[the_guy]

n7Epsilon, on Jul 24 2006, 06:03 PM, said:

The 32 GB limit is due to Windows 95 non-support of FAT32 (only FAT16) and the maximum size for a FAT drive is 32 GB (using some 3rd party utilities can get a 64 GB FAT32 drive) but at that size the cluster size is 32 KB and 64 KB respectively which is ridiculously huge and causes a lot of wasted space.

Windows 95 OSR2.x DOES support FAT32. It just doesn't support past 32GB.

@LLXX: If you do patch 4.00.1119, why don't ya try to also patch it so it can recognize past 32GB?
Also, can you post a link to where you found it?

the_guy

[LLXX]

@Petr, qazaq : Excellent.

@the_guy : It seems the 4.00.1119 I had was actually a 4.00.1116

I doubt the 32Gb limit exists in the driver. Perhaps someone should install Windows 95B (w. FAT32) on a 40Gb HDD or similar. One could also try using the patched 4.10.2186 driver (intended for 98fe).

From http://www.pcguide.c...sizeGB30-c.html :

Quote

Microsoft officially announced in 1999 that Windows 95 does not support hard disks over 32 GB in size. For that reason, I am including this in my discussion of hard disk capacity barriers. However, I must embarrassingly admit that after many months of trying to determine the reason for this exclusion, I have been unable to find out what it is!

Also, there are various references stating that "the FAT must be less than or equal in size to 16MB minus 64KB", i.e. 4MB minus 16KB clusters. Would it be possible to use a 120GB partition with a cluster size of 1 sector (512 bytes)? I have a lot of small files which 32K clusters would waste much space. However the FAT would then be approximately 900MB.

[MDGx]

You can (re)format your FAT32 disk/partition with 512 bytes cluster size using FORMAT.COM:
http://www.mdgx.com/...ts.htm#FORMAT-Z

Quote

FORMAT drive: /Z:n [Windows 95B OSR 2.0 + MS-DOS 7.10 and above ONLY]FORMAT drive: /Z:n formats a FAT32 drive with a cluster size of n times 512
Bytes. Meaning:
drive: = your hard drive letter: C:, D:, E:... etc.
n = number of sectors per cluster multiplied by 512 (cluster size in Bytes).
Examples:
n = 1 creates a 512 Bytes cluster;
n = 2 creates a 1024 Bytes (1 KB) cluster;
n = ? creates a ? x 512 = ???? Bytes (???? bytes : 1024 = ? KB) cluster.
You can modify the size of the allocation units (sectors) on a FAT32 drive to
your heart desire.
The /Z:n parameter canNOT be used with removable drives.
WARNING: It is NOT recommended to change the default cluster size, because
some programs such as disk-repair/anti-virus tools may STOP working properly!

___________________________________

* Microsoft Windows 95/OSR1/OSR2 IDE Driver ESDI_506.PDR 4.00.1116 + VOLTRACK.VXD (4.00.954 for Win95/OSR1 + 4.00.1112 for Win95B/95C OSR2) Fix:
http://support.micro....com/?id=171353
Direct download [154 KB, English]:
http://www.mdgx.com/files/Q273468.EXE

HTH

This post has been edited by MDGx: 25 July 2006 - 07:54 AM

[erpdude8]

LLXX, on Jul 24 2006, 08:14 PM, said:

@Petr, qazaq : Excellent.

@the_guy : It seems the 4.00.1119 I had was actually a 4.00.1116

I doubt the 32Gb limit exists in the driver. Perhaps someone should install Windows 95B (w. FAT32) on a 40Gb HDD or similar. One could also try using the patched 4.10.2186 driver (intended for 98fe).

WRONG!

Using patched 4.10.2186 driver under Win95 with 32Gb+ HDs will F*CK your system up and cause BSODs (and cause other problems)! This is why I dont want you to patch Win95 systems, LLXX. THEY'RE DEAD NOW.

Sorry but patching just the esdi_506.pdr file under Win95 is NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Other parts of the Win95 OS have to fully support huge HDs.

AND OHHHHH, reading this from this forum:
http://www.hardforum...hp?p=1026129864

Quote

Windows 95 does not properly support drives larger than 32GB without a high probability for data corruption.

yea the last thing I want on a 32gb+ HD is for it to mess up computer files under Win95. 32Gb+ HDs are best used on Win98/ME/2000/XP.

the_guy, on Jul 24 2006, 07:19 PM, said:

n7Epsilon, on Jul 24 2006, 06:03 PM, said:

The 32 GB limit is due to Windows 95 non-support of FAT32 (only FAT16) and the maximum size for a FAT drive is 32 GB (using some 3rd party utilities can get a 64 GB FAT32 drive) but at that size the cluster size is 32 KB and 64 KB respectively which is ridiculously huge and causes a lot of wasted space.

Windows 95 OSR2.x DOES support FAT32. It just doesn't support past 32GB.

ONLY Win95 OSR2, OSR2.1 & OSR2.5 allow FAT32 drives. Win95 original & OSR1 do NOT recognize FAT32 drives as I've tested for myself several weeks ago. Win95 & DOS 7.0 can only accept up to 2Gb partitions.

This post has been edited by erpdude8: 25 July 2006 - 09:50 AM

[the_guy]

That's what I said. Windows 95 OSR2.x (2.0, 2.1, 2.5) support FAT32.

the_guy