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Hard Drive Size

1681 Views 11 Replies 7 Participants Last post by  johnwill
Is there any limit on the size of hard drive you can have under Windows 98? This is because I know someone who wants to buy a 180gb drive to use with Windows 98, why is another question!
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I think 2Terabyte is the limit if you're using FAT32 under win98 (I believe it's also the limit for Fat32 period)
remember the days when 2GB disks were considered massive?lol
2GB....man you dated yourself...the origanal TRS-80 came with 16MB harddrive...and without mouse and monitor sold for a mere $899....

Wait now I am dating myself... :winkgrin:
I got one better.

Who remembers the True-Blue IBM PCs? I mean no hard disk, only two low density 5.25" floppy disks, monocrome monitor, and keyboard (no mouse). I think that sucker back then cost about $16,000 or something like that. Anyone still got one? By the way, your hard disk is so big that you'll need something else to partition it. Fdisk won't handle anything over 8GB. I used to run a 40GB under Windows 98 (which I partitioned under Linux, then later went back and overinstalled my pre-98 installation of Linux to make it active). It is still working fine.
Re: I got one better.

Lectraplayer said:
Fdisk won't handle anything over 8GB.
Tha'ts with Fat16, not Fat32. I've used Fdisk on 40GB+ Fat32 drives
G
There's some FAT32 stuff here
Lectraplayer,

IBM PC:

Dual 5 1/4" Floppy Drives
Monochrome Moniter
Hercules Mono Graphics Card
640 Kb of Memory on Memory Expansion Card
Keyboard
Epson FX-100 Wide Carriage Dot Matrix Printer

Total Price --> $4,895.00

Time to set up: 2 1/2 hours to figure out that funny looking plug on the monitor power cable plugged into CPU not into the wall socket.

:ufo: :ufo: :ufo:

twas
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Lectraplayer said:
Fdisk won't handle anything over 8GB.

ok, as a revision. The system must of has a outdated bios. Iv'e forgotten about bios issues. I know theirs some kind of bios overlay to allow larger, but I don't konw the specifics.
Somewhere around the middle of 1999, BIOS standards were upgraded to allow hard disks of more than 32gigs, the current maximum for most BIOS versions is 128gigs. I have a 160gig Maxtor, (150 real gigs), and I don't get to use 22gigs because of this issue. There was also a limitation of 8gigs several years before all this, don't remember the specific date, but it probably doesn't affect many people here anymore...

Here's an exerpt from a Maxtor white paper on this issue...

"The 137-gigabyte barrier is the result of the original design specification for the ATA interface that provided only 28 bits of address for data. This specification means a hard disk can have a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of data which
puts the ATA interface maximum at 137.4 gigabytes."

Here's the whole link: Large Disk Addressing
you should of just partitioned it so you'll get that extra 22G
I don't think you understand the problem, it's a limitation on accessing the physical drive, not the logical partition! The addresses for LBA access are limited to 28 bits, which translates to exactly 128gigabytes or 137,438,953,472 bytes. It doesn't matter how many partitions or logical drives you have, this is a hardware addressing issue.
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