Win98 and disk sizes / BIOS calls
Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 9:10 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3588 messages posted)
was: Can I install Win98se on new system?
|Unless I read the docs incorrectly,
| Pete
|
Yeah, I think you missed something.
|the 127 g limitation
|
"Grams"[1] are not a limitation. Weight is not an issue.
|would be inherent in w98's S506 ide driver
|(has to do with the way the drive size is expressed in binary form).
|
16-bit arithmetic is an issue--but not a complete deal breaker.
|If the driver can't find the drive because the drive is too large,
|it won't find any partitions on it, so adjusting partition sizes won't help.
|
Nope. The problem shows itself with old versions of FDISK
and the same problems plague ancient versions of SCANDISK & DEFRAG.
They are not insurmountable.
|Monkeying around with the CHS values in the BIOS settings
|can make the drive "visible" but not necessarily at its fully rated capacity.
|
Updating your disk utilities to more recent versions cures the problem:
cache
of http://www.hexff.com/w98_hd.php
+137GB+127GB
||Format.com on the Win98 boot disk won't recognise the NTFS drive
|| Keith Stanier
|Format.com should format a partition no matter what file system is already on it;
|
Nope. FDISK lays down the filesystem.
DOS-based Windoze (as well as its utilities) is NTFS-ignorant.
W98's FORMAT utility is expecting some form of FAT.
||98 is known to have problems with 512 Meg or more.
|I have 768 mb memory,
|
Sorry to hear about your 768 millibits if RAM.[1]
|and the same 98se installation has no problems with it.
|
Most users of DOS-based Windoze end up using the MaxPhysPage trick
for 512MB or more.
||DOS can see such hard drives via the BIOS whereas XP needs special drivers
|Hmmm well, from what I've [been] taught, after being started by the CMOS,
|
You inverted the mistake so many folks make
|the BIOS
|
Now you're back on track.
|sets the stage for
|
Yup. That's called POST and "booting".
|and starts the OS.
|
Sometimes called "loading the OS from disk into memory".
|Then the OS is free do to what it wants
|with regard to rearranging the props on the stage to suit its whims.
|
Yup. BIOS Calls are one way to do disk writes and other hardware accesses.
Modern OSes eschew that method and have their own handlers for that stuff.
|I.e.
|
{purely pedantic}The "i" is never capitalized in "i.e."{/purely pedantic}
|the BIOS points 98se in the right direction and tells it what to expect.
|
Well, it "initializes" the hardware.
(Boot == Pulls itself up by its bootstraps--without an OS in the picture).
|Then it (the bios) steps out of the way and 98se does its own thing,
|totally ignoring any bios setting it so chooses.
|
You got inverted again. "Settings" are in CMOS. What you meant was "BIOS Calls"
...but, yeah--shortly after you hear the single beep,
the BIOS (actually, its "bootloader" portion) is finished.
The Basic Input/Output System part of the ROM
is still there to be accessed as desired.
...but, yeah--once it locates a drive with an OS,
that OS is loaded and the OS kernel takes over.
[1] When using engineering terms, the case of the letters is significant
e.g., the difference between "m" (milli) and "M" (Mega) is 9 orders of magnitude
(from 0.001 to 1,000,000).
|
All messages in this thread [show all]
 | |  | Win98 and disk sizes / BIOS calls (gewg_: Sun, Dec 31, 2006, 9:10 am) |
| |
| |
Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum
|
|
