Win98SE and 137GB limit

[gen_angry]

So, this isn't a PCem related question technically but I'm not sure where else to ask. It could be a question at some point though if someone actually tried doing it and some of y'all have an insane amount of knowledge on the details of stuff so... anyways.

I built a P4 system for late Win98 games (using SE). It's got an Asus P4P800-VM board with a 48bit LBA bios so it can handle drives over 137GB natively. I've had a new'ish 250GB on it with XP, no issues. Right now, I'm running a pair of 80s on it which has been absolutely beat up over the years and would like to replace them both with this much newer 250.

I know it's a bad idea to run larger drives as primary, so I tried to use it as a slave drive with the LBA patch and had a lot of issues. Transfers would drop out entirely and files getting corrupted.

Tried to run the NTFS patches (both sysinternals and paragon) gave me blue screens like crazy.

My question is: could I split the 250 into two 125GB FAT32 partitions and run it like that to get around the 137GB 'limit' or is it a per drive limitation? I read that past 137GB limit physically on the disk, it can 'wrap around' and corrupt data. But I don't know if that applies to partition level or drive level.

I couldn't find the answer with Google and hopefully finding someone that knows the answer here before I spend a shitload of time and effort to maybe run into a dead end.

[leilei]

I have only one Win98se machine with a 160GB drive and the way i've dealt with that is use XFDISK to reserve a primary NTFS partition at the end for Windows XP (where it'll work), and have an extended partition on the gap before that and the other two primaries at the beginning (Win98/2K, WinME) so there'd be no way for those OSes to risk writing on the danger zone (since XFDISK's loader hides primary partitions)

[omarsis81]

The 137GB limit comes from the BIOS, so splitting it via software would be useless. Unless it's Windows 98SE who's having the problems

[infuscomus]

There is also a bug in the ESDI_506.PDR driver that causes it to overwrite existing data past 137GB.

rloew wrote a patch for it - https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute ... 7/pro5.3a/

[gen_angry]

I have only one Win98se machine with a 160GB drive and the way i've dealt with that is use XFDISK to reserve a primary NTFS partition at the end for Windows XP (where it'll work), and have an extended partition on the gap before that and the other two primaries at the beginning (Win98/2K, WinME) so there'd be no way for those OSes to risk writing on the danger zone (since XFDISK's loader hides primary partitions)

I ended up doing this, no point in trying to artificially limit myself to 98SE for 2002-2006 stuff.

Put the first 80GB for 98SE and the rest for XP. It works pretty well, thanks!