Are we having fun yet CHARLES?


Sep 16 17:47 04, CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to PAUL WESTELL:

 CA> I don't recall which version, possibly WinME, was first to _fully_
support USB 2. The larger drives I was referring to are 120 gig+ drives,
not 40 gig. 

USB2 is just fine here (well... there is this small problem with the floppy
IRQ - I blame ASUS for a crippled BIOS, and I don't use floppies anyway).
Once drivers have been installed, everything works when I plug it in, how
can I expect anything more?

 PW>> Last week I installed a 120 gig drive on a friends win98
system. I used slackware to partition the disk, after which windows had no
problem formating the 
 PW>> partitions and installing. It was not bootable though until I
added the helper softwear to the mbr, but that was a bios problem (as was
ms fdisk, it 
 PW>> uses the bios). 

 CA> Using other OS to augment W98 does not mean W98 is capable of
anything. MS released a new (free download) FDISK to handle larger hard
drives. 

The problems I had with fdisk, were not a failing of windows 98, but that
of the bios. Microsoft's version of fdisk gets its information from the
BIOS, if the bios has trouble with a drive, then fdisk cannot work with it.
This has been a Microsoft limitation since early DOS, perhaps fixed with
the download you mention. Once I had bypassed this _hardware_ problem,
windows itself formatted the drive, and installed without a huccough. This
indicates to me that windows 98 is quite capable of handling this drive
size, and with an updated fdisk, that will certainly be the case. The
manufacturers documentation (always an impeccable source) :) also indicates
win98 capable of handling a 120 gig drive as well, the problems discussed
there were with the BIOS. I would have had to do everything the same way
had I been installing XP or NT, and with a more recent BIOS we would not be
having this discussion.

Fdisk is just a utility, not part of the operating system, just a tool. The
one provided by Microsoft was broken, so I went elsewhere to find one that
worked. This is hardly augmenting one system with another. The drive
utilities provided by the manufacturer (Western Digital) mounted a version
of Caldera's DR DOS which I might have used instead. I merely chose a tool
that worked and used it.

The translation utility written to the MBR is something quite different,
has nothing to do with fdisk and is system independant. It only affects how
the BIOS reads the drive and is provided by the manufacturer. It does not,
so far as I know pass any information directly to the operating system. It
is necessary to install this to boot XP, NT or 98 with older BIOSs,
although Linux can usually work around it.
 
 PW>> I do not trust XP with a file system, it can't write a clean
partition. If you don't have a stable partition, you have nothing and may
as well be using 
 PW>> floppies. This, if nothing else will keep me from ever installing XP. 

 CA> I prefer W2K myself but use XP and see no such problems with the
partitions that you refer to. Can you expand on this partition problem that
I am unaware 
 CA> of? 

XP and perhaps variations of NT (including w2k) have trouble with partition
boundaries. Block information can be inconsistant, partitions occasionally
overlap, and other writes may exceed partition boundaries. This may not be
immediately fatal or even noticed by the system, but when it occurs it is
just a matter of time (backup, backup, backup). That I heard it from
disparate sources, each with direct experience makes me think it endemic if
largely unnoted. Most users will only care that their system crashed and be
satisfied to blame a virus or their teenager surfing porn. Who knows,
perhaps one of the service packs has it fixed, but as far as I'm concerned
it's poison and the entire family is suspect. You don't need to loose
partitions often, once is enough to spoil your whole day.

 CA> I don't buy new hardware but I read many complaints of no drivers
for older versions of Windows. 

That's to be expected, some still provide for win31 and many win98 drivers
will work equally well with 95, but lets face it, some users would rather
complain than search a website. What is surprising are those few providing
current DOS drivers. 


It could be worse ...
Paul

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.1