[Bill Berditzman]

Greetings,

I am truly puzzled and stumped at the moment. I have been trying to install 98SE on my new 250 Gig SATA drive. I can go through the install, but once it starts up windows the final time where you can start to install drivers and such, it locks up. I've tried to install on a smaller harddrive and image over using ghost, clone-ezz and drive image. same proplem each time. Has anyone heard of a solution or heard of this type of problem.

Yes my computer supports harddrive this big but this one is puzzling me. Did a burn in test on the computer before this and also used troubleshooter and pc doctor. No errors found.

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98se doesn't support drives that large "natively" as they say. You need to install drive overlay software on the boot device of your system during the format process. Go to the drive mfrs. website and download their software package, if you don't have it, to format the boot device you choose. I have an 80gb drive with 98se and drive overlay software and it works just fine.

[Tyger]

98se doesn't support drives that large "natively" as they say. You need to install drive overlay software on the boot device of your system during the format process. Go to the drive mfrs. website and download their software package, if you don't have it, to format the boot device you choose. I have an 80gb drive with 98se and drive overlay software and it works just fine.

[Bill Berditzman]

My bios still sees the original harddrive and previously I have been able to install 98SE on my 160 gig SATA drive.

Is there some disc size boundary I am unaware of that prevents 98 from installing on a harddrive bigger than 160gigs?

James

[Tyger]

There are definitely limitations, but they depend on the version of 98 and whether it is fully updated. When you installed on the 160gb drive did you use overlay software? It's generally written by Kroll.

[Bill Berditzman]

I did not use Disc overlay to install 98. I am in the process of backing up my data so I can do a disc overlay and try that.

[rharris270]

You might have two separate problems:

1. Maximum disk size supported directly by 98 < 127 Gig.

2. SATA drives not automatically supported by 98.

In the way of perspective, XP (original) did not support drives > 127 Gig, so you can understand why 98 might be having problems. As mentioned in a previous reply, most disk manufactures offer some sort of overlay software to handle the size issue.

Further in way of perspective, XP (even SP-2) has no native support for SATA drives, so of course, 98 has none either. One needs to hit F6 early in the installation of XP to load SATA drivers. In the case of a clone of XP from an IDE disk to an SATA disk (such as via GHOST), one needs to perform a "repair" installation of XP after the cloning is done. The repair also has the F6 option to install new drivers. 98 has no similar repair feature.

Thus, the best you can hope for is to do a clean install of 98, which should permit installation of the SATA rivers.

However, you first have to find the drivers. They should come with your disk controller (not the disk, but the controller). That is usually on the motherboard or possibly on an add-in PCI card. But, be warned, not all controllers have drivers for all operating systems, and 98 is getting a bit old.

[shard92]

to add a bit. even though you were able to install on the 160gb drive you would have probably had problems after you had 127gb on the drive. Drives larger than that ( actually I believe 98 will work with slightly larger than that under the right circumstances but it's been along time since I messed with this ) are an unknown for win98 and sometimes they will appear to work and sometimes they won't. How did you format the 160gb drive? fdisk that shipped with 98 would only reliably partition 64gb and beyond might get partitioned right but may not be reported right.... The point being 98 is old and is not designed to be used with large drives and as was said above... nor was it designed for sata.... though with sata it may just assume it is scsi....