Windows 98SE and its limitation to 60gb hard drives

[ancient]

Hi
I am using win98SE and the motherboard/amibios/fdisk whatever limits me to 60-65 gb hard drive. There is a fdisk upgrade from MS which enables you to formt to 137 gb. BUT i think my supermicro board still limits me to 65 gb.

My question is quite simply this : If i fit a 120gb hard drive and format to
2 partitions of 60 gb size each will it work

regards

and in anticipation of the normal quick response - many thanx


kennfortune@aol.com

[gmatov]

I don't thinkyour board is the limiter.

Yes, DL the Updated Comand.com. Go to MS,search for file #263044USA8, DL and unzip, make a new Boot Disk.

Be aware that when you fdisk, it will only show you 5 ddigits,it will look as though you have maybe 17 gigabytes to fdisk, but when you are down to 99 gigs it will show you what you actually have. I have used this with 2 160 gig drives, no problem.

BTW it's only 176 K DL, so no problem.

And no, you can't see large drive, so how can you split 120 into 2 to format?

The old Command.com deducted 64 gigs from the drive, your 120 would look like a 54 gig you could not ddo anything with an invisible 64 gigs.

Cheers,

George

[808smokey]

My question is quite simply this : If i fit a 120gb hard drive and format to 2 partitions of 60 gb size each will it work

Yes:
If you use the software that came with the hard drive. You can format to FAT or NTFS (FAT32 for win98). Windows98SE is supposed to read 100Gig. I tried it and it didn't work but it did read 95Gig alright. I would make a 20-40gig Primary and then split the remainder (extended) into 2 equal parts 50/50.
The MS fdisk update. Not the most reliable program. That program is meant fro beginners who don't really know a whole lot about the topic. You should always use the Software that came with the drive on 100+gig drives especially.

If you don't have the software.
Open fdisk format the max size it will let you, the 60-65gig or whatever. Then after you load Win98, get all the update, ALL OF THEM. Then use some program to format the rest, like partition magic or something like that. It will read it as unallocated/unformatted space.
JUST REMEMBER ONLY DO ONE THING AT A TIME IN PARTITION MAGIC.

Everyone always says it screws up there computer. That's because they move this here/ resize this section/move that to there/merge this to that/ and so on. Then click apply changes and its start doing it's thing til about 15% then crashes. Voila! everything is gone and Partition magic screwed your hard drive. You can only do one thing at a time. That goes will all partition programs.
Motherboards don't limit the size of the HD just the OS.

[argiris]

I'm using a 120GB disk as a whole in Win 98 and fat32, no problem.

The trick is to partition the drive with a utility that overcomes MS FDISK limitations. My favorite tool is "parted", a small Linux tool that fits on a floppy you can boot from, perform partitioning, and if you wish, formatting.

Then, you can boot from the old W98 and format from within Explorer to overcome the limit of the command-line format.

Works like a charm!!

BTW, Be careful if you decide to format FAT32 with Linux tools, explicitly specify the cluster size to be 32kB, or else defragmenting the disk may not be possible!


If you are interested in "parted", download the floppy image called "paud". Look it up in Goggle. Its free, of course!

[rkr1958]

Before I upgraded my old system from W98SE to W2k I had a 120-GB (second) harddrive. The entire hard-drive was one partition and all 120-GB were visible (accessible) under W98SE.

[The other Colin]

Motherboards don't limit the size of the HD just the OS.

My (old by current standards) GigaByte GA-6BXC needed a BIOS upgrade before it would see all of a 40GB drive.

Seagate's website (and probably most of the others, too) has a lot of good info.


Colin

[gmatov]

Best advice, use the Win update.

You are getting crap here.

If you use the Utilities that come with a new driv it sets parameters that any other machine cannot read. It fools the OS into thinking it has mmore sectors than are readable.

You may, however,listen to whomever you want to. No skin off my nose. You don't wish to make a new Boot Disk, listen to the ones who know all about it.

They all sound like experts. Why they have conflicting theories, I don't know, but.....

[argiris]

They all sound like experts. Why they have conflicting theories, I don't know, but.....

Not really conficting, as most of the people suggest different ways to bypass the same things!

I suppose that there are more than one solutions to each problem!
Sometimes they call it "innovation"....

[rkr1958]

Best advice, use the Win update.

You are getting crap here.

You may, however,listen to whomever you want to. No skin off my nose. You don't wish to make a new Boot Disk, listen to the ones who know all about it.

They all sound like experts. Why they have conflicting theories, I don't know, but.....

Man ... what's your problem?! We're just replying based on our experience. No one here claims to be an expert ... just a computer user / video editor who's trying to help. Are you just in a bad mood or are you one of these people who just always has that "Sunny Disposition" in life?