re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB Friday, May 22, 2009 at 3:40 pm Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum Posted by C K (6515 messages posted) I've had one more expensive USB enclosure that seemed to work well with a 200 gig drive on Win 98/ME with USB 2.0 drivers installed for the card. The cheaper/generic enclosures had a tendancy to corrupt the entire drive so that nothing was recoverable. http://www.48bitlba.com/usbharddrives.htm WIN 9X doesn't natively support 48 bit addressing from IDE or USB. The drivers that come with an enclosure to support Win 98 aren't all that stable I have found. Without proper 48 bit support in drivers, it makes no difference to partition since anything above the 137 limit needs 48 bit addressing to be available. Partitioning 120 and 80 won't help as part of the 80 gig will be above the 137 gig addressing limit. you could start out on the 80 just fine and then sometime down the road the drive corrupts when you start addressing where 48 bit is required to work, at least in my tests. DDO is designed for a non 48 bit controller as it is software that must run between your controller and it's drivers. DDO was made for IDE contollers on the motherboard and since a USB drive (with a PATA drive) will already have a 48 bit controller in it, DDO will not even do any good, and may in fact cause some issues. I have used a USB 2 card with fairly stable drivers (for Win 98) to connect a USB 2 enclosure with a SATA drive, and it functioned the same as a PATA drive. Problem is that I have found no USB 2 drivers for Win 98 or ME that I would trust long term. Win 9X can be so unstable sometimes that I wouldn't count on it for non-replaceable/critical data long term. It is a matter if when, not if a case of corruption will occur IME. Manufacturers just aren't concerned enough to spend a lot of time on drivers for out of date op systems and the hardware may not be conpatible at all in the future. Much of it isn't now for Win 9X. It's not just a driver issue anymore. Written in response to: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (Ed: Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:23 am) Responses to this message: re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (Ed: Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 9:25 am) All messages in this thread [show all] Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (Ed: Fri, May 22, 2009, 4:23 am) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (Steve: Fri, May 22, 2009, 6:16 am) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (C K: Fri, May 22, 2009, 3:40 pm) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (Ed: Sat, May 23, 2009, 9:25 am) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with USB (C K: Thu, May 28, 2009, 10:55 pm) Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with SATA (Ed: Tue, Jun 9, 2009, 1:36 pm) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with SATA (Ricer46: Sun, Aug 9, 2009, 7:28 am) re: Using a Hard Disk exceeding 137GB with SATA (Ed: Sat, Aug 22, 2009, 9:08 pm) Reply or follow-up to this message Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows Me Discussion Forum