I recently got a 250 GB usb hdd from lacie. I put things on the hard drive and it reported the free&used space fine. When I restarted the pc it went through the process of recognizing it as new hardware even though it was able to recognize it before. It changed the free&used space to if it was unused and will only report space being used for newly added files and not the previously added ones. In the past I would have used scandisk to repair the boot record to fix this but since the hard drive is >137GB and I am on win98se I don't think I could. I need a disk repair utility for win98se that can handle hard drives >137GB that lacie didn't provide with the hard drive.

Lacie thinks this is a symptom of data corruption and wants me to partition+format the hdd with their program. The previously added data and new data aren't corrupt.

I assume you're using the drive for storage and not running 98 on it?

Maxtor had a page on breaking the 137 gig barrier for earlier OS's. Since Seagate bought them out that page disappeared. The text of it is here:

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index....

in the first response just under the line that reads:

"And Finally Some More Information Here"

As I mentioned, the maxtor link is bad.

Since it's USB the ATA card is out. If you have an intel chipset you could try installing the applications accelerator. Then see if the drive is correctly seen by 98.

If you're looking to recover the data and the accelerator software works you should probably copy it off and then repartition the drive into 2 or more drives of less than 137 gig.

If you keep it as a single partition you'll need third party software in place of defrag and scandisk. Norton utilities might have something like that.

http://www.48bitlba.com/

USB Drives are not affected by the 137GB Barrier, the USB Driver supplied the Enclosure Manufacturer ie Lacie, should take care any O/S + BIOS limitations. Also you should as stated use 3rd Party Tools to Partition/Defrag the Drive.

I am presuming Lacie have written a W98SE driver for the enclosure, and they state it is compatable ??

Lastly you have not mentioned anything about the PC, you really need a NEC Chipset USB2 PCI Card to take full advantage of this drive..........

Tonka

You are correct in assumming the drive tools in Win98se should not be used on that drive. Doing so can result in CRC errors.

You shouldn't have any problems running the drive unless Lacie specifically states in their specs that USB 2.0 is required. No need to partition the drive as was stated above by Bakers.

Was the drive pre-formatted with FAT32?

What types and sizes of files did you send to the drive? Did you remove the drive without the use of the "safely remove" tray icon?

The point Baker makes about the drive enclosure driver is important. You must install a driver when using Win98se.

FAT32 does have a 4GB file size limitation. FAT32 also has a limit on the number of total files in a folder. Using long file names severely decreases the total. Best to create Folders and sub-folders to store files.