Patched boot disk

[shifty]

I was just reading a tread by colombo3 and I'm facing the same situation.I'm setting up a raid controller with two WD 80 gig hds and was wondering how to solve the same problem of recognizing large hds with W98.As far as making a patched boot diskwould I take an ordinary W98 boot disk and delete the Fdisk files and replace them with the patch downloaded from Microsoft?I also have Windows xp to add on another partition later.

[colombo3]

Shifty,
That's what I tried to do but it didn't work. I was still having a problem that I THINK had to do with what size clusters fdisk made (at least that's what MS's web site says the problem is). I just purchased Partition Magic, as per someone else's suggestion here, but noticed on the box (after I got it home of course) that it says it patitions drives up to 80 GB.....Well that's not going to help much is it?? I am going to try to call their tech support tomorrow in the hope they now have some sort of patch that will allow it to work with larger drives. Or maybe, since the program can change cluster sizes that alone will work. There's got to be SOME way around this since others have done it. If I find anything that works I'll let you know!

[shifty]

I downloaded the patch and installed it on another machine I have that runs windows98 and then made another boot disk because I thought that the updated fdisk would be on it.I don't know if it is or not.Would there be a way to tell if the updated file is on there?My new build is similar to yours but I have a Soyo main board with a Promise RAID on it.It's my first build and it runs well but I'm curious about raid and bought two new drives to experiment with it.I'd like to install XP and 98 also.I'll be looking for your posts to see how you make out.Thanks for your reply.

[colombo3]

Shifty,
You can tell whether you now have the correct copy of FDISK by right clicking on the file and checking properties. The correct new file size should be 64,428 for Win 98 or 64,460 for 98 SE.

OKay finally got Win 98 installed correctly. YAHOO!! :)

Here's what I had to do:
And this is hoping that you're doing are doing thse installfresh blank HD (or you're starting over). Keep in mind that at some point you're going to have more than one partition. From my current understanding of it you can't make partitions larger than 64 GB with FDisk (which is where I kept getting stuck!. I was trying to start out with just one partition!)

First:
Re Partition your HD with the new FDISK tool. Answer Y to large HD support. Go through the rest of the setup, making this your primary, active partion. Now when it asks if you want to make the whole thing just one partion JUST SAY NO <grin>. Choose a size for this WIN 98 partition that will work for you. I chose to do it the easy way and used percentages. 34% for me to be exact (I will eventually have 3 OS's, so I figured 1/3 of the HD for each). This worked because it kept the partion under 64 GB. (you will have to reboot to the floppy after this is done)

Next:
Now you have to format this partition. And this is another spot that caused trouble before for me (with the cluster sizes). I chose to use 32 KB cluster sizes. I understand you can also use 16 KHB cluster sizes, but when I tried this The machine told me it would slow down performance. Here's how I formatted this particular partition. At the A:\ prompt I typed ":format /z:32" And that's all there was to it. I reinstalled Win 98 and it seems to work. I am no longer getting error messages when i try the defrag.

One other point..If you will have more than 512MB of RAM installed you also need to do another fix. You have to go to the [vcache] section of your system.ini file and add the line MaxFileCache=524288. There was nothing originally under that section in my version of 98. Had to add the line myself.

here's the original explaination I got for doing the format:

When you partition with FDisk a HDD above 64G FDisk will usually only see X - 64 = Y so 80G - 64G = 16G. There is a patch somewere so that FDIsk will see up to 137G but the simplest work-around would be to use a percentage value instead of actual size. When you make your first partition try using 50% when asked what size & another 50% for the following partition if you only plan to have 2 of them. This should give you a 40G + 40G when done on a single 80G HDD. When your on RAID I would imagine the same thing since I have not tried it with dual 80G. When formating them type "FORMAT C: /Z:32" to format partition C: Repeat for any additional partitions you created. Note that the "/Z:32" parameter formats the disk with a block size of 32x512B=16k - matching the stripe size & with a 64k stripe size you should format with /Z:64 as /Z:128 produces an error."

Try to make sure you are doing Windows installed with the bare minimum of hardware installed. Add each piece one at a time (and any driver updates). You do all of the fixes you need to before moving on to the the OS install in case something goes wrong and you have to start from scratch!

From my understanding, adding XP later should be no big deal. It should ask if you want to create a new partion (yes) and it'll make one and format it itself and then install. At least in theory, that's how it works :P

Let me know if this works for you too. Good luck!!
-Eve

[shifty]

Thanks for the long post.I'm going to need the help.I printed it because I don't know when I'll get to it I have so many things going right now including a two week vacation but I'll make sure to get back to you with the results.I'll be watching for your posts.Hope I can help you some time.Thanks again.