Specifications

Windows 137GB Capacity Barrier Version 1.0
17 7-Mar-2003
New system consideration
– Seagate's DiscWizard Starter Edition disc installation software is
designed to make building a new system as easy as possible. If your system BIOS sees the full
capacity of the drive DiscWizard will not install a DDO. If your BIOS has a capacity limitation,
DWSE will install a DDO that is compatible with the IAA or eventual OS upgrade. DWSE also
provides the convenience of a fast partition and format saving nearly an hour over the operating
system tools.
Windows 98SE has a default limitation of 137GB supporting ATA interface disc drives.
Therefore, your boot drive partition will have a maximum size of 137GB.
Warning: Formatting a drive past the 137GB barrier on a system that does not meet all
requirements of BIOS support and the Intel Application Accelerator 48-bit Addressing
operating system drivers will result in data loss. Seagate is not responsible for lost data.
If you have an Intel compatible chipset, and after the OS and IAA are installed, any additional
gigabytes will show up later as unallocated space on the drive. You can easily create a second
partition with DiscWizard 2003 or the Windows Fdisk partitioning tools.
Adding a drive to an existing system
– Seagate's DiscWizard 2003 disc installation software for
Windows is designed to make adding a new drive to a system as easy as possible.
8. Windows 98SE on a PCI controller card
Controller cards support ATA interface disc drives through their own onboard BIOS and Windows
device drivers. These storage controller cards are plug-and-play compatible and usually detected
in the Windows Device Manager as "SCSI controllers" due to the similarity in disc access
command structure. Since the drives are supported by drivers that emulate the SCSI driver
approach, the native Windows 137GB ATA limitation does not apply since those drivers are not in
use.
If your disc drives are recognized by the controller BIOS when the system is first powered on but
later the drives are not seen by Windows then the device drivers for the controller card need to be
installed. See your controller card documentation for direction.
Companies which are known to manufacture ATA controller cards that support drives greater
than 137GB are SIIG, Inc (http://www.siig.com
), Promise Technology, Inc.
(http://www.promise.com
), HighPoint Technologies, Inc. (http://www.highpoint-tech.com) and
ACARD Technology (http://www.acard.com
).
Nonetheless, the native Windows 98SE ScanDisk and Defrag utilities are limited to smaller
partition sizes and may not function on partitions greater than 127GB. Because the 16-bit
memory model causes this limitation it applies to any type of drive interface on either
motherboards or controller cards. There are no fixes available from Microsoft for this limitation.
Third-party software may be available to defrag and monitor larger FAT32 file systems. Seagate
recommends creating partitions of a size that can be managed by the native Windows 98SE
ScanDisk and Defrag utilities.
Microsoft has issued updates that relate specifically to ATA (IDE) interface disc drives and
Windows 98SE limitations and recommends that you keep the OS updated with the latest drivers.
For example, see also the Microsoft Knowledgebase articles Q273017:"Windows IDE Hard Drive