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Larger filesystems win98 can read from?

hunterjwizzard

hunterjwizzard

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I run my windows 98 machine off of a CF card and love it that way. I have a secondary drive for CDrom ISO images I use to play games Presently that drive is using one of those IDE-to-SD cards.

Then I finally got my hands on an IDE to SATA bridge, allowing me to attach a SATA hard drive. Now the obvious answer is to make some FAT32 partitions at the largest supported size and call it a day. But I wonder: aren't their larger file systems '98 can read from?

I AM NOT TRYING TO BOOT WINDOWS 98 FROM A DIFFERENT FILE SYSTEM. Just drying to make a real big D:\ drive for all those very many image files.
 
Paragon used to offer NTFS support for Win98. I think there was also a driver to read Linux ext2 disks as well though I don't remember who produced that.

Please note that few programs available for Win98 could handle files longer than 4GB so there may not be much practical benefit for other file systems.
 
krebizfan said:
Please note that few programs available for Win98 could handle files longer than 4GB so there may not be much practical benefit for other file systems.
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You mean other than being able to access several hundred 700mb files? Its a drive to store CDrom ISO files. I just want to be able to hold more of them.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
You mean other than being able to access several hundred 700mb files? Its a drive to store CDrom ISO files. I just want to be able to hold more of them.
Click to expand...
That should be a perfect use case for FAT32. My DVR requires FAT32 and can store hundreds of recordings. Okay, the DVR breaks each recording into multiple 2GB chunks but that is still larger than what you plan on storing.

If you are planning on drives larger than 2TB, I am dubious that would work well. Almost certainly wasn't tested since the Win98 drivers were written before the drives were manufactured.
 
krebizfan said:
If you are planning on drives larger than 2TB, I am dubious that would work well.
Click to expand...

Nah, only need like 1tb max to hold every game I could ever want to play. Its the fat32 partition size limit I need to overcome. I don't want to have to have the drive separated into a ton of partitions.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Nah, only need like 1tb max to hold every game I could ever want to play. Its the fat32 partition size limit I need to overcome. I don't want to have to have the drive separated into a ton of partitions.
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FAT32 supports up to 2 TB partitions. I know that on Windows 2000 through maybe 10, a third party formatting tool was needed because the GUI format was capped at 32 GB. Command line might still work but I don't have a spare drive to test right now.
https://support-in.wd.com/app/answe...e-to-format-memory-cards-&-usb-drive-as-fat32 provides links to some potential formatting tools. There are a lot of other FAT32 formatting tools out there but many of the pages don't inspire trust. I can be fairly confident that WD won't intentionally link to malware. WD used to have their own formatting tool for use with hard drives but it doesn't seem to be available anymore.
 
Just remember that there's a 4 GB file size limit in FAT32.

Also that FAT32 is not in any way fault tolerant. Expect to be running scan disk a lot and data corruption.
 
Sysinternals had an NTFS driver for Windows 98 but it was pretty buggy. I haven't tried the Paragon driver, but I've been less than impressed with other Paragon software in the past.

I would rather use native FAT32 over third-party NTFS support in Windows 98. Data corruption will only occur when writes get interrupted. The use case of ISO storage for CD emulation is read-only once the files are copied.
 
The Paragon was adequate at reading NTFS. At least, one could reasonably expect to prove that a disk taken from a failed system was not corrupted. Writes were less successful. With some luck, an NT4 disk could have files added in a way that the NT4 system could read. Given the cost of Paragon, it was cheaper to get a copy of XP and dual boot to XP to read any NTFS drives.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/110814-ntfs-support-in-win-98seme/ had one of the longer examinations of the various NTFS for Win98 products. Hopefully, that would dissuade most from trying it.

For those that are willing to go beyond the limits of ordinary judgement, there was FAT+ which was an effort to permit larger than 4GB files on FAT32. Said effort excluded Microsoft so attaching such a drive to many systems would corrupt those large files. https://web.archive.org/web/20150219123449/http://www.fdos.org/kernel/fatplus.txt
 
Fortunately, I have no need of files over 4GB.

So here's a silly question: I can point my win98 PC at a network share from a windows XP system running NTFS and it works just fine. What gives with that? Why can it see multi TB network shares but not access the disks natively?
 
Also note that with newer hard drives you may need to 4k align the partition. Win9x/ME won't do that. Just partition and format the drive under a newer Linux system and you are good to go.

As mentioned, Win9x can handle drives up to 2TB, and FAT32 can have a partition size up to 2TB. However, I have encountered corruption problems when writing to FAT32 partitions larger than 127MB under real mode DOS (located anywhere on a drive, this is not a drive LBA issue). They will will work fine if you stay inside Windows.
 
The stock Win98 ATA/IDE driver is limited to 128GB because of LBA28. With a third party driver or patched driver (and suitable BIOS support if it's a boot drive) you could use a FAT32 partition up to 2TB.

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Though under DOS, it could be very slow. The 128GB drive needs a 16MB FAT; higher capacity drives means even larger FATs. I would hesitate to try a 2 TB FAT32 drive even under FreeDOS which does include patches to go beyond 128GB.

The Intel Application Accelerator was one of the more common ways to get support for more than 128GB for Windows 98. Any system with enough memory to cache a 256 MB FAT should be able to be patched to support such large drives.
 
I've seen some online discussion suggesting that hard drives formatted as UDF 1.02 can be read by Windows 98, though I've never tried it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
You could MS network to a capable system. Since file access is done by file name, there really aren't (IIRC) any volume size limits.
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^This.^ With networked file sharing the file system is irrelevant. It's the other system's OS' problem to resolve.
 
Moondog said:
^This.^ With networked file sharing the file system is irrelevant. It's the other system's OS' problem to resolve.
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Only problem with that solution is I have to have a second PC booted anytime I want to play, which is kind of a pain in the ass.

I wish win98 could just talk to my NAS. Of course I also keep all the ISOs compressed on the NAS...
 
It probably can if you enable less secure options, like smb1.

Sometimes they have to be done from the command line.

I think I saw someone post a YouTube video about this not too long ago. Maybe Philscomputerlab?
 
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