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could not make dual-boot on my 80GB HD

X

X14

Senior member
I bought my 80GB HD yesterday with the intention of building a dual-boot system with Win98SE/WinXP but I just couldn't get it Win98SE to load properly. I bought the IBM 120GXP, I know IBM is crap but I thought I'd give them a chance since there specs are better than just about any HD other than the WD 8MB buffer HDs. After all, I am one of the rare few with a 75GXP that is still working flawlessly.

I'm running a AthlonXP 1400 @ 143FSB on an EPoX 8K7A with a Radeon 8500. I tried loading Win98SE 5 times and finally gave up. Everytime I had the exact same problem and I think it has to do with the IDE drivers.

I could get Win98SE to load fine. I partitioned off 3GB for my Win98SE primary partition. After loading 98 I'd load the AMD driver, the IDE driver, and all the other stuff but the HD is extremely slow. I mean agonizing slow?ccopying 500mb takes almost 15 minutes. So I loaded the IDE miniport driver which actually solves the problem and the HD read/writes seem to be normal for what I'd expect from this drive.

But after loading the IDE miniport driver, on the subsequent reboot the system gets back to the desktop and hangs every single time. It can never load the IDE miniport driver (you normally get the "V" icon in the taskbar when it loads) and I just get hourglass forever. Every single time the same thing happens. I reformatted and reloaded Win98SE 5 times and finally gave up.

I put WinXP on as the only O/S and everything works perfectly now but I wanted 98SE on there for a few games that don't work as well as I'd like them too in XP. Oh well, I guess I can live it but had I known this was going to happen I might have gotten only a 40GB HD since I figured with 2 O/Ss on the computer there would be a few redundant programs that I'd have loaded for both O/Ss.

Does Win98SE have problems with large HDs? This almost seemed like the VIA southbridge problem that plagued the KT133 boards.
 
What IDE drivers are you loading? That motherboard has an AMD northbridge and VIA southbridge. You need to load the AMD AGP driver, then load the VIA 4-in-1 drivers EXCEPT for the AGP one.
 
Yup I used the VIA ones. I've had this system running flawlessly with Win98SE many times with all the exact same hardware with the exception of the 80GB HD I just installed to replace my old 30GB...can't figure out why it won't work.
 

A volume must contain at least 65,527 clusters to use the FAT32 file system. You cannot increase the
cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that it ends up with less than 65,527 clusters.

The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With
a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum
disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program.
Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, the
Windows 95/98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger
than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so
ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than
4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out,
at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Win2K/XP.
The Win2K/XP FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file
system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool. This behaviour is by
design. Microsoft recommends using NTFS for partitions greater than 32GB.

=====================

 
This is how I partitioned. I partitioned primary DOS for 3GB for Win98SE. The remaining 77GB was partitioned to extended D. Then I partitioned D: for a 7GB WinXP logical drive and the remaining 70 or so GBs into logical 20GB drives.

Did I do something wrong?
 
I formatted each drive using FAT32 and would have reformatted the D: drive I had partioned for WinXP to NTFS when I loaded XP but I never got that far since Win98 had those problems.
 
Would this have made a difference? I used the FDISK that came with WinME cause the Win98SE FDISK does not correctly report the size of large HDs. I found out there is a new FDISK at MSFT's website to correct this but I don't think it should make a difference should it?

At any rate, I tried loading WinME once which resulted in the same problem so I don't think this was the problem. Anyways looks like I'll be using a single O/S now. I've got everything all loaded and working well so I don't feel like messing with the puter again tonight.
 
Wow Jelly, I've only got 5238 more post to go before I catch up to you. That's about 14 years if I post once a day or 7 years if I post twice a day. Now if I post 333 times a month which is once for every hour my IBM 120GXP HD is allowed to be on, I'll catch you in 16 months LOL.
 
Heh well if you think I'm bad you should see some of the real power posters!

I'm currently configuring a new rig (Intel though) in a similar manner (2 GB partition for 98, 6 for XP, 112 for data). Haven't installed an OS yet though, that's next.

Did you enable DMA transfers?
 
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