This Bug is valid for All FAT-16 versions of Windows 95. (Win95 and Win95a)
Win95b (OSR2) should not be affected.
Windows 98 is free from this bug.
The key issue in this whole story is: Are INT 13h extensions present in my system BIOS?
I have written a utility that detects, and displays details of, the Int 13h extensions of your PC's BIOS.
If this utility can not find any extensions, then you're OK.
If it does, part of the display will look like this:
Detection utility for Int 13h extensions v1.3 (c) 1997-2000 Jan Steunebrink ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Harddisk 1: Int 13h extensions version 2.1 detected. Subset supported: Extended disk access support (for > 8GB) : Yes Drive locking and ejecting support : No Enhanced Disk Drive (EDD) support : Yes Device features : DMA boundary errors handled transparently: No Device supports write with verify : No Media is removable : No Addressable geometry (CHS) is 524x255x63 Cylinders-Heads-Sectors/track A total of 8418060 Sectors of 512 Bytes (4110 MB) are addressable in LBA. |
You can download the utility here; it is called EXTBIOS (6 KB ZIPfile).
The utility is now at version 1.3 (07/07/00) and comes with a text-file with more information.
Another useful program is Partition Information (127 KB) from PowerQuest.
It displays all data from the partition table(s) in readable form. Under 'FS' you can see the partition types, so you can check for the new partition types 0E and 0F.
If you see 0E or 0F instead of 06 or 05, you definitely need the fix from Microsoft.
Detailed information on the Int 13h extensions can be found at The Phoenix Technologies Technical Library. On this page you can download the specs-edd11.pdf file which contains the Enhanced Disk Drive specification v1.1 and the specs-edd30.pdf file that contains the EDD specification v3.0 update. The EXTBIOS utility is based on these documents.
The Int 13h extensions were designed to meet the ever increasing demand of harddisk space and performance. BIOSes with the extensions support: