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!
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.
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 The system must of has a outdated bios.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."
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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