Hard Drive Size

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.

Click to expand...

Tha'ts with Fat16, not Fat32. I've used Fdisk on 40GB+ Fat32 drives

There's some FAT32 stuff here

Lectraplayer said:

Fdisk won't handle anything over 8GB.

Click to expand...

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 The system must of has a outdated bios.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.