Windows 98 Help (New Hard Drive and possibly File System Help)

[A4orce84]

Hey Guys,

So I recently bought a new seagate 160gig hard drive to put in my machine. Currently it has 2 hard drives, and I have a dual boot system.

60gig HD ---> C: set as Master containing 98
13gig HD ---> D: set as Slave containing XP

Both HD's are getting pretty full, so I bought the new Seagate 160gig hard drive and want to do this:

old 60gig HD ---> C: set as Master containing 98
new 160gig HD ---> D: set as Slave containing XP

Well I got the new HD installed, and I had some original trouble with it being formatted in NTFS..and we all know that 98 can not read NTFS so I had to reformat in Fat32.

After doing it, and having my bios detect the 160 gig hard-drive, Windows 98 can finally read the new HD! =)

As seen here:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/A4orce84/Drives.jpg

But my question is was talking to a friend and he said that Windows 98 can't handle anything bigger than 137 gigs, even if it is just another HD that win98 is NOT even on.....is this true? So as I load XP and other things on the 160gigs, when it get's bigger than 137 gigs it will possibly corrupt data on D: when Win98 tries writing to it ? Thanks again for all the help in advance!

I also found a website talking about Windows 98 and bigger HD's, but it just somewhat confused me:

http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm

But if anyone can offer me any assistance on my questions, I would appreciate it. Thank you!

--Asif

 

[wolluf]

How did you partition/format it? (as that article says, 98's fdisk doesn't support this size of partition) - did you use something like partition magic?

As the article also says, 98 system tools won't work on it either. I'm just wondering what the main use of this drive is going to be - and do you need write access to it from 98?

Some suggestions:-

Partition it into 2 or more partitions that 98 can cope with. If you need some of it for 98 to store files on, put XP on an NTFS partition and leave the rest as fat32? You realise that a fat32 partition that large will have an enormous cluster size (probably 128kb, at least 64kb) - so you'll be wasting lots of space.

http://www.sysinternals.com

have a free NTFS readonly utility for win98 (which is why I mentioned do you need write). I'm also guessing that you won't actually be using 98 that much - if you've got XP, can only see the point for running older apps (games?) which don't run on XP.

HTH

 

[A4orce84]

Thanks Wolluf for the info.

I formatted it in Fat32 with a hard drive that Seagate includes with their new hard drives. It worked surprisingly well. I would like to have both read and write access between all hard drives, because it makes it easier to move things around.

The website I pasted seems to only suggest those tips if you were to install Win98 on a HD bigger than 137gigs...my question is about using one in addition to a Win98 HD. Win98 will stay on my 60gig, I'm just saying can I use the 160gig's entireity THROUGH Win98 without partitioning or doing anything....that's what I'm confused about.

I looked at sysinternals read NTFS program, and if it could only read and WRITE it would be perfect for my needs...unfortunately it is only a read-only program...but none the less thank you for info. Do you have AIM or MSN Messenger? Also please keep the comments and advice coming, I appreciate it.

--Asif

 

[wolluf]

If your win98 installation can see the whole partition now, then you should be ok, as you won't be managing the partition from 98 will you?

I assume XP will be happy managing it (eg, chkdsk, defrag etc will work) - but I don't know. My concerns (as i said) would be the very large cluster size and that fat32 wasn't really designed for this size partition (it was really a quick fix to fat16 to get over its 2GB limitation - which again wasn't really a limitation, just where its cluster size had got large too). Also fat32 gets 'corrupted' in normal use far more easily than ntfs - and as its not designed for recovery, its harder for chkdsk to fix than ntfs is. This is true for < 137GB partitions, so will be at least as true for larger ones.

I'd say if this is what you want - try it, but monitor how it works for the first week or so (and be sure to have backups of anything vital you store on it). If you have lots of niggles/issues, look at another method. If not, just continue.

btw - there is a write version of that utility, but it costs!

PS. I do occasionally use messenger - but it just takes up too much time

 

[A4orce84]

wolluf,

Thanks again, yes I wasn't planning on using scandisk, disk defrag, and the other's in 98 since it wouldn't be able to handle the new HD. I'm not too concerned with Fat32, since I know people who have even larger HD's (250+ gigs) running Fat 32 with no issues.

See my problem is, even though 98 is on another HD than the 160gig, people have told me that after I load enough things on the 160gig that passes the 137 cap that 98 has...that's when issues will start to come up. So that's my question, after i load XP and all my data on the 160gig slave, will 98 explode when trying to write to it after it passes the 137gig cap? Thanks. Any other comments/info/advice is appreciated, please let's keep this going for everyone!

--Asif

 

[wolluf]

Asif - without creating a large fat32 partition & win98 installation myself to test (which quite honestly I haven't time to do), I can't say for definite. BUT - if in the first instance, 98 can happily access the whole 160Gb or whatever, then that would say its ok to me. You may get future problems - but they'll just be the usual ones (mainly, 98 is a crap o/s!). I can't see how/why '98 will explode' if its ok in the first place (or at all in fact - it will just not work in the first place).

 

[Hamster38]

Does anyone know what the following message means , when playing games and even when trying to re-install Windows (XP) by the way a Blue screen appears with the following message STOP:0x000000D1 (0x7064695F,0x00000000,0x7064695F).Cannot get to the bottom of it any loght on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
Hamster 38.

 

[edfair]

How about starting a new thread, Hamster. And in XP.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[edfair]

A4orce,
You may find out later that some issue corrupts the drive. And then it may be too late.
Wolluf gave you an alternative to split the drive into sections that are accessable by both without exceeding the more or less built in limitations. That sounds like a reasonable solution to me. I don't deal with large drives like that, but my dual and triple boot machines all have shared drives that all access. In some cases the shared drives are really devoted to one system or another but all can get there if something is needed.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.