Microsoft Windows 98 Update: Large IDE Update

Microsoft Windows 98 Update: Large IDE Update is launched as an essential and helpful patch which can eliminate an issue on Windows® 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition computers that have an integrated device electronics (IDE) hard disk that is larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size.

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

This problem only occurs on computers that use a Phoenix BIOS and use the Phoenix BitShift translation algorithm to report the geometry of large IDE hard disks (larger than 32 GB). Your computer is not vulnerable if the BIOS uses logical block addressing (LBA) Assist translation instead of the Phoenix BitShift translation.

NOTE: If you have upgraded from another version of Windows and selected to save your previous version of Windows during the upgrade, you will not be able to uninstall back to your previous version of Windows with this update installed. Disabling the option to uninstall Windows ensures that your system will continue to support your large IDE drive.