Throw away the hard disks and install new ones?

Maybe an odd problem.
But a colluege of mine has a problem like this.

He has a PC, today running win98, and want to upgrade this with a raid system with 2 S-ATA discs conected to the PC through a controller card.

So the original discs are removed from the system and the new ones are installed.
Putting in the cd with windows xp and rbooting the pc. When trying to format the new drives: always the same message come up.
"Drive too big to be formatted" despite how big (small) partition that is set up

/Don

 

I have very little experience with replacing hard drives, but I thought I read somewhere that Windows98 only accepts drives up to 30GB? I think any size larger cannot be formatted by that OS. Can anyone verify this?

 

Just came across this article. Windows 95 appears to have a 30GB max while Windows 98 has a 64GB max. I am sure other hardware restrictions may also impact the actual max figure for a PC.

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

 

hi, i'm not too good with hardware, so this might be totally wrong. but, these are the things i'd look in to -

1, check win98 can use SATA drives
2, check the motherboard can use SATA drives. ( or at least SATA drives of the size he's using)

the problem will probably be something to do with having old hardware/software (that's if the hardware is as old as win9 there's a good chance that both the software - win98, and the hardware just don't have any idea what SATA is, or aren't made to use SATA, something like that anyway . but, like i said i'm not very knowledgable with hardware, so hopefully i'm wrong

 

Hello,
There's a limit to how big a FAT32 drive can be - around 32GB methinks.
Mrk

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/core/fncc_fil_tvjq.mspx

Maximum Sizes on FAT32 Volumes

Id check the mobo's BIOS supports LBA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

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

of course the mobo\OS should be treating those drives like they are SCSI devices (PCI ATA cards use SCSI drivers)
getting them installed in Win9X however
Win9X was so long ago
and predating 48bit LBA as well read that last link, avoid overlay software if at all possible

as far as XP goes
(which Id highly recommend over Win9X)

use NTFS and Press F6 to load third party SCSI drivers during the install (drivers for that SATA card from floppy)