NF2 and SATA300 SG160 HDD

[E_Net_Rider]

I tried that Intel tool and it responded it could not tell if it was supported. Some weakness in the tool?
It might be because I had already set the drive to 137 limit via SG tools.

I've been danceing with it and not much luck. Stepping all over myself. I did catch this one thing in that if I set the Extended IDE drive - (choice auto or none) to none, BIOS still sees drive in boot screen and it gets rid of duplicate removables in explorer. Down side is drive is extremely slow and DMA will not enable. I strongly suspect MS needs a stick taken to them.

Post set up with SG tools, such as it was, I played with their site information about using fdisk. It would not allow me to blow away everything, something about it could not lock disk. It did allow me to add in that above 137 as another partition. But a little strange behavior with that as well. It must have un-formatted the 137 as it was not being seen upon reboot. It showed up after formatting with format, and as duplicates again.

One of those tools, as I recall, told me not registry change not needed, did not apply to ME, my setup, something like that. But I see you did it manually, which I might now try. Having read the links, it should be safe to do, just to gain full space, since the first 2 partitions on current drive are only about 35G, which where I might do dual of XP with ME.
From those links, also should be no problem with SATA as long as any OS partitions are below 137. Sounds iffy as to whether data might get lost, corrupted in partition that would extend above 137. Good backups I guess and definitely up to date until comfort zone is reached where I feel it is OK.

Is the 200G a SG, or maybe more importantly, was SG tools used in setup? I'm not sure what using them does when limiting to 137, but I noticed this behavior. With drive listed in BIOS, if I set to none, save/exit, and on reboot to bios, the drive is not listed. Use auto detect and it is detected as 137g drive, exit save again and in the boot bios screens, I noticed at least once it was listed as 137, but otherwise as 160. I am beginning to think the order of entering some changes to bios requires exit save and in some cases appears to effect access to subsequent options.

Currently I am on 7njl6 MOBO, after giving up getting the drive even detected. I suspected bad controller on delta2 fsr. At least, I now know that to be false. Same chipset. BIOS obviously different as core cell is not incorporated. I am going to give this a little more wrestling, try custom bios I got that was touted much better especially for xp, but saw no real difference under ME. It did not cure my multiple lettering for USB HDD. And if anything, it seemed they condensed some screens.

Despite how great the fsr is supposed to be, I had crash lock problems with core cell enabled and anything but a slight overclock. Benchmarks I recorded were everything set basic. The 7njl6 shows 10 to 20% better benchmarks on everything. Least improved area was video and suspect that tied to GPU card. Where improvement surfaced it was probably related to AGP aperature, use of off card RAM.

I would like to eventually get all 3 mobo working with these issues. (2) 7njl6.

Maybe try XP on them.

[uddarts]

2 x 7njl6, tiger direct special? i know of no lba bios problems with any chaintech board.

xp/sp2 enables lba default, xp/sp1 maybe and all others don't. my problems was with 2k/sp4 and adding a large drive later. you have to manually change the registry or install the os on a lge drv. the lba tool seems to work well but always check the registry to be sure.

i have been using partition magic to carve up my drives on the 2k/sp4 using fat 32(limit of 190 gig). recently starting to use ntfs(no limit) and now have the xp/sp2 on my main rig.

so if you decide to dual boot, enable lba on the me os, install xp(check registry) and use pm 8.0 to set the large drive up afterwards. just delete the old partition on the new drive, format and partition. i have had no problems since i figured out the registry.

95% of my drives are wd. a sg 400gig sata 2 arrived last week but is still in it's box.

i've seen a lot of people that had your board with the ultra mem, the illegitimate xp2900/200fsb and problems.


ud

[E_Net_Rider]

First one was tiger (choke choke ) special. I gambled having previous history with them. Was not as careful as I should have been during assembly with some problem. May have been unused case firewire cable slipped under board before I got it tightened, possibly sharp points eventually poking through insulation. Other major point was power. Dang cheap mate lock connectors, ie Molex. None gold plate and slight surface corrosion causing power interuptus. Next issue was Ultra RAM, SPD was burned to 400 when actually 266, so manual set fixed that.
But on this issue, did you have to partition 200g for ensured reliability?
There appears there may be a limitation in WME to have a partition larger than 137, but would like to know for sure. At least part of the work around is to keep OS partitions below that point. Registry key needs to be done manually in WME it appears. I ran tool from list you sent and it said I didn't need, but it was not in registry either.
Bumped up against the blue screen of switching all drives to msdos compatibility again. Happened after blowing everything away on drive with fdisk and now understand which point on MS list of reasons applied. "The Windows 32-bit protected-mode disk drivers detected an unsupportable configuration or incompatible hardware." Did not make sense without knowing drive had nothing on it, ie no dos partitions. But that shows another stupid point of SG tools if you boot to their disk after hooking up drive. Pops up window cautioning about working in msdos and suggests doing it from windows. Default to continue or not is "no". Choose no and you will end up in the frustration I got without knowing why.
As to PM8, procede with caution. I will load and try again but don't like their method of partition resizing once the disk is setup. So since drive is empty, will use the tools that require emptying drive, to just know they work, and can get drive up.
I believe you are right and began to realize that as to bios and size issue. Even with drive limited to 137, bios read the correct size of 160. I'm thinking I've ruled out size issues except with OS, and again SG tools wants to automatically limit at 137 when ME is checked. No option to even use rest of drive.
Never had problem with WD either, other than bad instruction about manually setting DMA speed which broke 3. Only tried SG because WD down to 1 yr warranty, SG 5yr. and price. Friend works in WD test lab. Can get me drives, but they've been through everything imaginable and have most of the life ate out of them when he gets through.
I'm definitely considering dual/multi boot. I'm going to look more closely at ways to do it, besides PM8. Maybe I now understand enough techno to get through XOSL or other similar. I will have to weigh how MBR is effected. Although backing up and restoring it is available via SG & WD tools, it is usually accompanied with a caution that it is advised against under some circumstances.

[uddarts]

i was slow to move off 98se and when i did i jumped over me to 2k/sp2. i did a lot of dual boot for a while so i stuck with the fat 32. all my lba experience has been with 2k.

here's a link that pretty much covers your concerns.

http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm

[E_Net_Rider]

The stuff about tools is an issue.
But most importantly is what causes the issue at the barriers.
There are updates for the barrier that as I recall is around 68G for w98 and they are basically replacing 98 versions with ME versions of fdisk, scandisk, and don't remember which others for sure.

But the 124/137G barrier is a different animal. It is because of a file that is part of the operating system. ESDI_506.pdr. Its limitation is with the FAT size. I broke that once with 98 or 98SE before understanding the limitation at 68G or maybe the driver one. I'm not sure what my goal was anymore but in the original setup I used smaller than standard clusters for partitions such as 4k on 32G partitions. Everything looked great at first and I started transferring backed up data to the drive, installing lots of programs.
Boom! to a halt, scrambled everything.
As I said, no longer certain if it was running scandisk on 80G drive that did it or the breaking of maximum FAT size. Frustrations running parallel to this forced me to just do a standard install and get updated files for SE.
At issue is the maxinum number of clusters that can be handled by the driver. To arrive at the maximum HDD size, multiply the maximum number of clusters by 32K, which is the largest cluster 98, SE, & ME will handle. Can't use 64K clusters for some reason. If you set cluster size to 4K, your maximum drive size is much smaller.
As I wrote that it occurred to me I could have set myself up for trouble even with the 80G drives and will have to look at info concerning this again. I had set up those drives with 7 partitions. 1-OS, 2-swap, 3-TIF and other frequently changing data, 4-games, 5-programs(like office, corel, etc.), 6-AVG(audio,visual,graphics), and 7-storage. All with standard cluster which was 4K I think, except last partition.
So I need some rechecking, was I approaching that maximum number of entries in the FAT, even with 80G drive? Or is that 137G limit assuming you might use all 4K clusters rather than the standard 32 for a drive that size. Not an important issue at this point since partitions I was setting would have been all 32K. Not so terribly worried about slack because the damn files have all grown in size. ME does a better job of managing RAM, Disk issues, than <98. And having a large number of entries in FAT to deal with might be more performance robbing.
Also the tools that were a problem at 68G (or was that 64G) and updated to the ME version, maybe their limit is the drive size, unrelated to FAT size. Some claim the new fdisk has no limitation. And maybe I didn't melt down because of the way entries in the FAT occur. It only has entry for first cluster of a file and a pointer to the next cluster is written near the end of that cluster. That is you could have only one entry in the FAT for a file up to the maximum file size limit of around 4GB.

It would take some definite sorting to locate the true limits behind the 137G barrier.

There is a SE diehard group. They don't like ME or anything later. They have done extensive work with SE including some non-official patches, and at least one of them will make your interface look like XP. But there are several caveats. Some are definitely recommended you don't try to uninstall. Could be problem if you reinstall and several steps immediate after such a refresh. It was working pretty good for me but got to reason unremembered, I used startup disk with older scandisk and it made a total mess of install. Never got back to it.

And they now claim an updated ESDI_506.pdr that fixes the 137G problem for the OS, several OS's. However they may not have fixed scandisk and the other disk tools yet.

Now all that aside, I am wondering about NTFS. I know little of it other than it was invented for greater reliability. Was never adopted into home OS's because it runs slower and they felt the public would not put up with that slower speed so they stuck with FAT to sell more machines and OS.
I have to wonder if industrial OS stuck with NTFS for compatibility, reliability, or what. And if maybe there would not be a better still file system if not for compatibility issues.

Maybe the answer for those 98 gurus is to come up with a kernel/patch to allow use of NTFS since machine speed is not the issue it used to be, except it is much slower today than potentially because of file bloat. Maybe they don't already have them out, AMD with its quad, but can you imagine trying to bog down W95?

I would suggest double checking that list about enabling 48b LBA to make sure you haven't broken a rule.
Many claim they did it with 98, etc. but reality is the meltdown doesn't occur immediately or short term most often. It does not happen until the HDD starts filling up (again may be related to number of entries in FAT vs. actual HDD size) and then when it reaches that 137G barrier, the .pdr causes it to wrap back to the beginning causing overwrite of anything that would be in those locations on disk.

My immediate aim is to get drive working and to avoid a melt down I will stick with 137 limiting. Can turn on remainder of drive once OS is able to handle it. But my last call to SG, finally got someone with a brain and knowledgeable (young lady with heavy SEAsian accent). Was leading me through several checks, but I ran out of time and did not get answer to origianal question, "will and how do you set 137 G limit with fdisk?
Too early for them to be open today and likely take several calls to get same person, so will procede with assumption I had. That is can do it by just not creating partitions beyond 137G and hope the system never interprets that unused space as imcompatible drive, thus MSDOS compatibility mode.

Later, hope I haven't boored you
Norman

[uddarts]

bored, no! way above me, yes!

ud

[E_Net_Rider]

Well I got it installed without letter scrambling, no primary partition.
but still have 2 letters for each partition of SATA. It refuses to accept removing check from removable in device manager settings.

No idea what issue is now?

[uddarts]

maybe it may be time to ask some one who knows?

windows
http://forums.pcper.com/forumdisplay.php?f=85

storage
http://forums.pcper.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40


ud

[E_Net_Rider]

Thanks UD.

I posted over there. Hope I can find an explanation to the double lettering.

I am totally out of ideas on that issue.
Only thing left is to maybe try to set up SATA as primary and install ME to it. See what that shows me with a fresh install.
Also could reinstall OS with current setup and see if HDW detection phase handles it better or overwriting a bad file fixes it.

I did notice that WME is no longer prevalent. Just that one large group of 98 diehards when it comes to older OS.