Win-98 and large hard drives, custom cluster size (new information)
98 Guy
500 gb hard drive. I used the switch that prevents ACPI installation,
and after all is said and done I have no yellow (!) showing up in
device manager. On-board lan and USB are functional. I haven't tried
the on-board sound device yet, so I don't know if I'll get it to work
(I have it disabled in the bios). Windows hung during the first
startup attempt - bootlog.txt showed the problem was hsfloppy.pdr. I
renamed both hsfloppy.pdr and esdi_506.pdr and windows started fine.
I installed VIA drivers (from VIA) and the nvidia drivers, etc etc. I
re-named the hsfloppy and edsi_506 back to what they should be, and
the system still started and works fine. Updated directx to 9.c.
Updated IE and went to windowsupdates and downloaded all that shit.
Under System Properties, Performance tab, it says:
"Performance may be improved by enabling virtual memory"
In the Performance status list, virtual memory is indeed disabled.
In the Virtual Memory window, the button "Let windows manage my
virtual settings" radio button is selected.
Neither windows scandisk and defrag run. They both complain about not
having enough memory. The system had 256 mb of memory during initial
installation, and still gave that error when I increased it to 512
mb. scandskw.exe, dskmaint.dll, and defrag.exe are windows-me
versions. Only issue so far is that the system doesn't shut down
properly (it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the
upper left corner).
Hardware details:
Motherboard: Asrock Dual-VSTA
Hard Drive: Westen Digital WD5000KS (SATA)
Video card: some Nvidia 6200-based AGP card
CPU: Socket 775 Intel Celeron, 3.46 ghz (133 mhz fsb, 26x ratio)
Hard drive was formatted using Western Digital software as one single
500 gb fat-32 volume. Details as reported by dos chkdsk:
487,431,968 kilobytes total disk space
484,868,672 kilobytes free
4,096 bytes in each allocation unit
121,857,992 total allocation units on disk
121,217,168 available allocation units on disk
The WD software requires me to select with OS I will be using. Even
when I tell it I want to create a FAT-32 partition, it still wants me
to specify the OS, and it lists Win-98 along with ME as different
choices - as if there is some difference between win-98 and ME when it
comes to FAT-32 (is there?). I chose win-ME.
Dos scandisk runs fine (it takes about 5 minutes to start working and
show the various tests, the Directory Structure test takes about 15
minutes). I haven't timed it yet, but I estimate scandisk takes 20-30
minutes in total to execute on this drive (without surface scan
test). And I haven't used much of the drive yet (about 2 gigs by the
looks of it).
When booting into dos, it takes a few minutes to perform the first DIR
command (this was expected based on previous tests with 160 gb
drive). No delay was noted when browsing the drive in Windows.
This is a great motherboard, either for exclusive win-98 use, or for
dual boot use. My test board is an older version of this motherboard
(only supports dual-core CPU's according to the box) but I have
several others (new-in-box) that are 4-core versions (quad-core
Kentsfield, 1066 mhz FSB, DDR2 667). Both versions have AGP and
PCI-e, and both have 2 DDR and 2 DDR-2 memory slots.
It's a bummer that windows-me scandisk and defrag won't run, but in
practice I wouldn't install win-98 on a volume as large as the entire
drive. This was just done out of curiosity. For a working system, I
will probably use something between 24 and 32 gb primary C:\ volume,
formatted with 4kb cluster size for efficiency and compatibility with
Norton Ghost for cloning purposes.
In theory I could perform a file-creation test and load this drive
with millions of files to see how 98 handles it.
I don't think simply creating a whack of empty directories or files
with null size is a useful test.
So to summarize:
1) not sure why win-98 isin't using or didn't enable virtual memory
2) windows-me disk tools complain about insufficient memory given
121 million clusters (system has 512 mb ram).
3) DOS scandisk doesn't complain when operating on a 500 gb drive
with 4kb cluster size (121 million clusters)
teebo
> I have just installed win-98se on my Asrock test platform, on a new
> 500 gb hard drive. I used the switch that prevents ACPI installation,
> and after all is said and done I have no yellow (!) showing up in
> device manager. On-board lan and USB are functional. I haven't tried
sounds wonderful :-)
> the on-board sound device yet, so I don't know if I'll get it to work
> (I have it disabled in the bios). Windows hung during the first
> startup attempt - bootlog.txt showed the problem was hsfloppy.pdr. I
strange that you needed the motherboard drivers to preventing
the windows floppy support to hang the system
>
> Under System Properties, Performance tab, it says:
> "Performance may be improved by enabling virtual memory"
> In the Performance status list, virtual memory is indeed disabled.
>
> In the Virtual Memory window, the button "Let windows manage my
> virtual settings" radio button is selected.
if you set the settings yourself, making a permanent swapfile
do it still say that virtual memory is disabled?
someone had some similar problem after installing the servicepack
and fixed it by edited both Min/MaxFileCache [vcache] in system.ini
he did set them to 2048 (but that is only 2Mb but you could try
fiddle with it, there is some size recomendations at
http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html )
the error could allso be given if win386.swp is readonly
> Neither windows scandisk and defrag run. They both complain about not
do scandisk/defrag even run on a LBA48 drive?
(I thought they killed any data after 137 GB, but I might be wrong)
There must be something better that one can replace them with
> versions. Only issue so far is that the system doesn't shut down
> properly (it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the
> upper left corner).
Hmm... have you tried a older version of the nvidia drivers
to se if it shut down corectly then?
> The WD software requires me to select with OS I will be using. Even
> when I tell it I want to create a FAT-32 partition, it still wants me
> to specify the OS, and it lists Win-98 along with ME as different
aha.. western digital send a partitioning program with its disk...
And I guess they think the program is more "userfriendly" that way :-)
(and maybe it is for people that never heard of partitions
and formatting and different formats - and don't want to know)
otherwise you could use freedos fdisk I think
> When booting into dos, it takes a few minutes to perform the first DIR
> command (this was expected based on previous tests with 160 gb
why? or are there something I missunderstood here...
> This is a great motherboard, either for exclusive win-98 use, or for
> dual boot use. My test board is an older version of this motherboard
> (only supports dual-core CPU's according to the box) but I have
> several others (new-in-box) that are 4-core versions (quad-core
you have several motherboards just lying around there?
I'm a bit jealous ....
> In theory I could perform a file-creation test and load this drive
> with millions of files to see how 98 handles it.
just download lots of random songs and movies with dc++ or
something and make copys (and copys of the copys recursively
in a nice directory hierachy till the disk is 90% full ;-)