Large IDE Hard Drives

[jhorak]

Windows 98 SE Will not normaly see more than a few Gigs at a time correct ? So If I got a 20 Gig hard Drive in my laptop computer and it sees all 20 gigs then chances are there is a disk utlity installed such as eazy drive am I correct in assuming so ?

[GaryRouth]

Windows 98 2nd Edition won't have any trouble recognizing a large drive that's formatted with the FAT32 file system. The FAT("FAT16") file system under Win95 would only use 2gb partitions.

It's the motherboard of the system that matters when recognizing the full size of drives. As long as a recent bios is in place that can recognize the large drive, and it's formatted with FAT32, Win98se will see it.

A 20gb drive is actually pretty small for most motherboards from the last three years. If the laptop's bios shows the full 20gb in the POST screen that flies by, you're fine. If the laptop is more than four years old, watch while it boots, and see if you notice a banner, "Intitializing EZ-Bios", at startup = that would point to that drive overlay as you suspect.

Another way to check for a drive overlay is to boot the system with a bootable floppy, and use the utility fdisk, option 4 = to show partition information. If you see only a non-Dos partition, chances are it's an EZ-bios drive. Only use option 4 in fdisk for this, the other options make partition changes, which you don't what to do (you could lose all your data).

If Ez-bios is there, and everything's working properly, it's probably best left alone. It works well enough for what it does (provides an interrupt 13 workaround).
. . . Gary