Windows 98SE, Pentium III and large HDDs
Posted: 2018-03-23 11:23
Hello there community, i come here to request for some advice.
I own a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic S computer i want to refurbish.
It's an old PIII Coppermine 1ghz on an intel 815i motherboard chipset.
I pretend to turn it a decent Win98 gaming computer with DOS capabilities.
However i'm having some problems.
I would like to have a 250gb IDE HDD installed and it's driving me nuts.
I'm aware that there are several limitations for large HDDs, related to the BIOS or Windows98SE themselves.
That's what i've tested so far having a boot disk for Win98SE and a bootable CD based Win98SE installation.
FDISK only detects around 40GB of space on the HDD.
I've partitioned the HDD using FDISK and created a primary partition of a bit less than 8gb, where i've installed DOS 7.10 using the unofficial installation CD.
The rest of the detected HDD was set as an extended partition of around 34GB.
I can install Windows98SE on the extended partition with apparently no issues.
However, i wasn't able to make the rest of the HDD available, not even for windows.
I've tried a couple of partitioning tools (W98 based) with no luck, they can't just detect the hardware returning an error message related to the drive unit of the geometry of the HDD.
I've used GParted to partition the rest of the disk, but was not satisfactory either... I was able to partition, boot up and all the stuff, but, if i only set a single partition for the around 190gb remaining, the partition will not be recognised properly since it's over the 137gb limit.
So i have partitioned it setting different partitions, different sizes... A bit of testing.
It seems W98 is not able to recognise a 64GB USB memory stick in the same way it can't recognise any HDD partition over 64GB.
I believe it makes somehow sense since outside W98 the computer can't detect sizes over 41GB.
I'm not sure about how all this stuff works, i've never tried to install such a large size HDD on a Windows98 system.
I wonder if there's some way to make all the space accesible.
I've read somewhere about installing a PCI-IDE controller card, but i'm not sure if it would solve anything, or if it would be accesible under DOS.
Any idea about how to solve this situation?
Thank you very much.
I own a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic S computer i want to refurbish.
It's an old PIII Coppermine 1ghz on an intel 815i motherboard chipset.
I pretend to turn it a decent Win98 gaming computer with DOS capabilities.
However i'm having some problems.
I would like to have a 250gb IDE HDD installed and it's driving me nuts.
I'm aware that there are several limitations for large HDDs, related to the BIOS or Windows98SE themselves.
That's what i've tested so far having a boot disk for Win98SE and a bootable CD based Win98SE installation.
FDISK only detects around 40GB of space on the HDD.
I've partitioned the HDD using FDISK and created a primary partition of a bit less than 8gb, where i've installed DOS 7.10 using the unofficial installation CD.
The rest of the detected HDD was set as an extended partition of around 34GB.
I can install Windows98SE on the extended partition with apparently no issues.
However, i wasn't able to make the rest of the HDD available, not even for windows.
I've tried a couple of partitioning tools (W98 based) with no luck, they can't just detect the hardware returning an error message related to the drive unit of the geometry of the HDD.
I've used GParted to partition the rest of the disk, but was not satisfactory either... I was able to partition, boot up and all the stuff, but, if i only set a single partition for the around 190gb remaining, the partition will not be recognised properly since it's over the 137gb limit.
So i have partitioned it setting different partitions, different sizes... A bit of testing.
It seems W98 is not able to recognise a 64GB USB memory stick in the same way it can't recognise any HDD partition over 64GB.
I believe it makes somehow sense since outside W98 the computer can't detect sizes over 41GB.
I'm not sure about how all this stuff works, i've never tried to install such a large size HDD on a Windows98 system.
I wonder if there's some way to make all the space accesible.
I've read somewhere about installing a PCI-IDE controller card, but i'm not sure if it would solve anything, or if it would be accesible under DOS.
Any idea about how to solve this situation?
Thank you very much.