Windows 98 hard drive capabilities

[DuffMan]

I have recently installed a Maxtor Plus 9 160 GB ATA133 as a secondary hard drive into the computer detailed below. I'm running windows 98 so I used the setup up floppy and rebooted to fdisk. I created a primary partition and formatted. I did how ever notice that the fdisk program reported the drive to only be 25GB where as it reports my seagate 40GB drive as ~40GB.
However, when I booted back to windows, explorer reports the Maxtor drive to have total capacity of 152GB. The there's BIOS, which detects the drive as having 163.9GB.

Can anyone tell me whch one is accurate, and more importantly why none of them are a true 160GB? I mean the windows estimate is 8GB out and fdisk well thats just silly.

Furthermore, even though windows is reporting a large capacity how do I know this is all usable? I dont happen to have 150GB of files lying around that I can copy over to test it.

Thanks to all who reply.

[RJ]

FDISK does not support very large hard drives, therefore it gives you a false number.
Windows 98 does not natively support 48 bit LBA, which is required for hard drives >128 GB, but there are ways to make the drive work in Windows 98.
Just read here: http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm

The BIOS just displays the size which with the manufacturer advertises the drive. The 160GB are a lie, and a rough estimate anyway.
It is a rough estimate, because the precise capacity is usually a few GB different. Like in your case, it's 163.9 GB, so it's a little more than 160 GB. But nobody says that it's a 163.9 GB drive, they just round to the nearest "easiest to remember" value, which is 160 GB in that case. So 163.9 GB is the accurate value.

Still, it's a lie. The manufacturers use the term GB, although they are no GB. 1 GB is 1024 MB, a MB is 1024 KB etc. But the manufacturers use 1000 instead of 1024. So, the 163.9 GB are actually 163.9 billion bytes. I wish they'd introduce the term BB (billion bytes), but well, they use the term GB, and they use 1000 coz it produces a bigger number, which is good for marketing.

Now Windows and every other software, they don't lie. They use the correct value of 1024, hence they give you the correct size.
You can calculate it: 163.9 billion bytes are 163,900,000,000 Bytes. Divide this by 1024 to get KB, then divide the KB by 1024 to get MB, and then once again to get GB. . . true GB. And you'll get 152.6 GB as the result.

This value, 152.6 GB, is the real capacity of the drive.

RJ

[DuffMan]

Great post RJ, very informative except one point I am still unclear on. If my windows 98SE does not yet support HDD > 137BB in size, then how come it is reporting 152BB. Is the last 25BB of the drive simply unusable?

I hope you liked the 'BB'

[RJ]

The 152 are in fact GB, not BB
The drive has 152 GB, and 163.9 BB.

Sizes reported by Windows, or any other software, are GB. Sizes written on the hard drive itself, or on advertisements etc., are BB.

I don't really know why your Windows 98 sees the entire size of the drive. But I would be cautios, as maybe it still doesn't handle it well, so your data on the last 25 GB are not really safe. I've heard about such things happen, but that's all I know about it.

RJ

[DuffMan]

Oh right I see where youre going with BB now (after having got my calculator out). I should know these things since im doing a degree in computer science!

Thanks for the advice though. I shall make sure when I get to 137GB if I havent upgraded to XP by then, that I only save expendable files to the last 25GB

[glc]

Under these circumstances, you should probably use Maxblast to set up the drive. It will get around FDISK's limitations.

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Insert the MaxBlast CD or Floppy and restart the system.

When MaxBlast 3 asks if you would like to prepare the drive for use on your system, click no.

Select "Set up Your Hard Disk".

A list will appear with all the drives on the system. Click on the drive that needs to be formatted and click on "Next".

Choose the operating system on the Master "Boot" drive.

Choose “Install drive as additional storage”

Choose an installation method and follow the onscreen prompts. "Easy Installation" will create one large partition on the drive. "Advanced Installation" will give you the option to create more than one partition.

Proceed with the rest of the instructions.

Remove the floppy or CD when MaxBlast is finished. Restart the system.

The new drive is now ready for use.

----------------------------

Do not try to make the whole drive a single partition. Windows 98 cannot deal with a single FAT32 partition larger than 137gb.

[DuffMan]

The drive was shipped OEM. I assume the program MaxBlast you refer to is part of the retail bundle.

What you say is interesting though. If I could obtain this software then following your instructions I could split the drive into two partitions of 80GB which would be no problem for windows 98se right?

[glc]

You can download Maxblast from Maxtor's website - and you can get it 3 ways - a floppy maker, a bootable CD .iso, and a version that runs in Windows. That's what I would do - at least 2 partitions, neither of which are larger than 137gb.

[Markman385]

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/dow.../maxblast3.htm you can get maxblast here. i don't know for sure but i don't think splitting it into two partitions will help any since the problem is with the addressing.

[glc]

I just reread the link that RJ provided. In view of this, to be safe, I'd probably create a single partition 137gb or less, and leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned. You can test trying to partition the whole drive with Maxblast, but as indicated, be prepared for corruption and not being able to run scandisk and defrag.

I would definitely make sure that you have the latest Win98 Via chipset drivers.