Use the default suggestion of LBA if you expect to read the drive in another machine. The BIOS is likely limited to the 28bit LBA limit of 128GB.

Thanks for the reply! I think it's 28 bit LBA because that's limited to 137 GB, right? 48 bit LBA supports up to 144 PB.

I'm not concerned about the loss of disk space (ie. not using the full 250GB HDD) but I just want to make sure there is no data corruption or other problems.

Typo on my part. Yes, 28bit. I'm actually surprised BIOS gives the other options on any drive above 8.4GB. The old CHS system and BIOS translation was no longer relevant on larger drives.

OK - Thanks!

If the BIOS only supports 28 bit LBA does that mean I can use/partition the 128 GB and it will safely ignore the rest of the drive?

Yes, you can ignore the rest of the drive. The machine can't "see" it.

Awesome, thanks so much for the help!

This drive overlay will give you LBA 48 BIOS support:

http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2056

But getting windows 98 to work with LBA48 on your boot drive it is a separate challenge and probably not worth the effort.

Thanks very much! It's probably not worth the effort since 128GB should be plenty (MORE than plenty!) for Win98 and I'd like to avoid the hassle of separate boot drives, etc.

In this context (you're only configuring the implementation of CHS Int13 access) LBA is indeed the least worst 😀 - all 8 GB (unlike Normal) with the most standardized formula (unlike Large)

In fact, the geometries listed for Normal and Large exceed the maximum supported by Int13 CHS commands, and I suspect this is why a PC I have with a 32GB CF doesn't like Microsoft OSes…

To get LBA-compatible software to use Int13X LBA access (and therefore the full capacity without additional drivers, "additional" being relative to the BIOS disk implementation), a completely separate setting must be enabled, which is often missing - meaning it's either always enabled or not implemented at all 😀 🙁

Thanks for the explanation even if I don't quite understand all of it 😀

When I was looking for modern SSD drives, the Crucial MX500 was the cheapest decent drive but the smallest capacity was 250 GB. I'm not worried about using all the space though. I think that 64 GB would have been plenty but they don't make those any more, haha.

However, since I can use at least 128 GB I'm going to look into multi-booting (just for the heck of it) between DOS, Win98, etc. (I've heard that System Commander 8 Multi-Boot is a good choice?)