ScanDisk Errors on IDE Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB

ID: Q243450

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 95
Microsoft Windows 95 OEM Service Release versions 1, 2, 2.1, 2.5

SYMPTOMS

If you use the protected-mode (graphical) version of ScanDisk to perform a thorough scan (which includes a surface scan) on an integrated device electronics (IDE) hard disk that is larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size, ScanDisk may report errors on every cluster after approximately cluster number 967,393.

CAUSE

This problem may occur on computers that use a Phoenix BIOS and use the Phoenix BitShift translation algorithm to report the geometry of large IDE hard disks. On such computers, the Windows protected-mode IDE disk driver (Esdi_506.pdr) may not correctly recognize the translation mode for the drive, resulting in an inability to access areas of the drive beyond the first 32 GB.

This problem does not occur if the BIOS uses logical block addressing (LBA) Assist translation instead of Phoenix BitShift translation.

RESOLUTION

A fix for this problem on Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition is under development. This article will be updated when a fix becomes available.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

IMPORTANT: There is no fix available for any version of Windows 95. The reason for this is explained in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q246818 Windows 95 Does Not Support Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB

Note that this problem affects only the protected-mode (graphical) version of ScanDisk.

The real-mode version of ScanDisk does not exhibit this problem. As a workaround, you can boot to a command prompt and run ScanDisk in real mode.

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbtool osr2 win95 win98 win98se
Version : WINDOWS:95
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbprb