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Windows Forum / Windows 98 / Performance / December 2005ATTN: Ron Martell, question on 160GB drives and Win 98
Hi Ron, I've been trying to help a woman in alt.windows98. She has a Maxtor 160GB drive but doesn't want to update the OS (Win 98 FE) for a drive larger than 137GB. Somehow she was able to partition and format the drive to the full 160GB using Fdisk and the format utility. Now she wants to limit the size of the drive to under 137GB (128GiB). She has a 43GB C: and logical drives D, E, and F inside an extended partition. If she deletes the F: drive she will be under the limit. The question is; will having the extended partition going past the 137GB limit cause problems? I haven't seen anything on the web relating to this. She said it took several hours to do the partition and format and would rather not have to do it again to get the "above 137GB space" out of the extended partition. Also, a secondary question on a related issue, she wants to install W2000 at a later date. I know nothing about W2000. Can it be installed inside the FAT Ext Part on the space left by the F: drive and dual booted? Or will it need a primary partition, as I suspect, outside the FAT ext part. Will it dual boot with W98? Can it be on a drive other than C:? If you like you can read our discussion on alt.windows98.  SignaturePat She is in for problems and added expenses--see this web site for details: http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm If she wants to dual boot W2K, the easy way is to use a boot manager and partitioning program such as: BootIt Next Generation is available from: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ and it does partitioning, makes a compressed image, does many other partitioning chores and is a boot manager. It is not quite as easy to use as Partition Magic but it is half the cost and has more features. Unlike the crippled PMagic demo, BING is a *full function* demo you can try for FREE for 30 days. The web site has a lot of support articles. SignatureRegards Ron Badour, MS MVP for W98 Tips: http://home.satx.rr.com/badour Knowledge Base Info: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbinfo > Hi Ron, > [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] > > If you like you can read our discussion on alt.windows98. >She is in for problems and added expenses--see this web site for details: >http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] >the crippled PMagic demo, BING is a *full function* demo you can try for >FREE for 30 days. The web site has a lot of support articles. We've gone over the 48bitLBA site several times. She has decided to avoid the problem by limiting the size of the disk available to W98 to under 137GB. If she deletes the F: partition she will be under this size limit. The question is, will the extended partition she created, which extends to the full size of the drive, be a problem after deleting the F: partition? The demo you linked to might be good idea. That way she could redo the whole drive, leaving the space above 137GB untouched. She could also put the D: drive outside the ext partition as an inactive primary partition. That would, it seem to me, make installing and dual booting to W2K much easier in the future (unless W2k can run from a logical drive inside a FAT32 extended partition. Is this possible?). If the Boot Manager included with BING dies after 30 days, would some other boot manager work to dual boot the system? Perhaps, once W2k and the dual boot situation is settled, the extra space above 137GB could be formatted as NTFS and therefore available to W2k only (with the right service pack) and hidden from W98 completely. I don't know what this would do to the drive letters under the different boot options. SignaturePat You can put as large capacity hard drive in the PC it can handle. As long as your total files seen by 98 do not exceed or approach 128GB, no problem. The number or size of partitions don't matter in this context. An extended partition is simply a container for logical partitions, has no bearing. MS dual boot relies on one partition c: for boot files, the remainder can be placed elsewhere. SignatureJonny > Hi Ron, > [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] > > If you like you can read our discussion on alt.windows98. >You can put as large capacity hard drive in the PC it can handle. As long >as your total files seen by 98 do not exceed or approach 128GB, no problem. [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >MS dual boot relies on one partition c: for boot files, the remainder can be >placed elsewhere. Thanks for the help. She deleted the extra partition and all is running as it should. SignaturePat > >You can put as large capacity hard drive in the PC it can handle. As long > >as your total files seen by 98 do not exceed or approach 128GB, no problem. [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > Thanks for the help. She deleted the extra partition and all is running > as it should. Umm, at the moment, anyway........ SignatureGlen Ventura, MS MVP Shell/User, A+ http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm >> >You can put as large capacity hard drive in the PC it can handle. As long >> >as your total files seen by 98 do not exceed or approach 128GB, no problem. [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > >Umm, at the moment, anyway........ Would you care to elaborate? SignaturePat A source at MS told me that W98 does not support hard drives larger than 137 gb regardless of how they are partitioned and that data loss is possible when a partition starts to approach being full. This site details a work around; however, I cannot vouch for it as I don't have a drive that large. http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm SignatureRegards Ron Badour, MS MVP for W98 Tips: http://home.satx.rr.com/badour Knowledge Base Info: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbinfo >>> >You can put as large capacity hard drive in the PC it can handle. As >>> >long [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > Would you care to elaborate? >A source at MS told me that W98 does not support hard drives larger than 137 >gb regardless of how they are partitioned and that data loss is possible >when a partition starts to approach being full. This site details a work >around; however, I cannot vouch for it as I don't have a drive that large. >http://www.48bitlba.com/win98.htm Are you saying that a 160GB drive that has only 130GB partitioned and formatted is at risk, even though the remaining space is not partitioned, not formatted, and is unavailable for use in W98. If this is the case, then Seagate (and probably others) has made a grave error with their partitioning and formatting software since that is what it does when used on a W98 machine. It will not allow use of the drive beyond 137GB. The remaining space is left unused and unavailable. SignaturePat Yes. I am repeating what I was told by a MS source and I cannot speak to Seagate's procedures as I do not have a hard drive big enough to experiment. I throw the info out so the person can "error" on the side of caution and keep good back ups or upgrade to XP. SignatureRegards Ron Badour, MS MVP for W98 Tips: http://home.satx.rr.com/badour Knowledge Base Info: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbinfo >>A source at MS told me that W98 does not support hard drives larger than >>137 [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > it does when used on a W98 machine. It will not allow use of the drive > beyond 137GB. The remaining space is left unused and unavailable. Please read the last sentence in the "caution" on the bottom of the weblink you provided. This is the problem at hand. Not the partitioning or otherwise. My own experiences with same show same results. SignatureJonny > A source at MS told me that W98 does not support hard drives larger than 137 > gb regardless of how they are partitioned and that data loss is possible [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] > > > > Would you care to elaborate? >Please read the last sentence in the "caution" on the bottom of the weblink >you provided. This is the problem at hand. Not the partitioning or >otherwise. >My own experiences with same show same results. That is what I thought was the situation. As long as total data is less than 137Gb (128GiB) the problem isn't an issue. As I understand it, even having the drive formatted to over 137GB isn't a problem as long as the total data on the drive is less than 137GB. Obviously, formatting to less than 137GB insures that the total data will be less than this limit. This is a different problem than running ScanDisk and Defrag on large partitions. Per Ron Martell's post of a couple weeks ago, the ScanDisk and Defrag issue has to due with the number of clusters in a partition not the actual size of the partition. Although, as I understand it, there is a 120GB limit on ScanDisk and Defrag regardless of cluster size or cluster count. SignaturePat > >Please read the last sentence in the "caution" on the bottom of the weblink > >you provided. This is the problem at hand. Not the partitioning or [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > there is a 120GB limit on ScanDisk and Defrag regardless of cluster size > or cluster count. Neither Ron can't really confirm what I'm saying about this. MS has been terribly quiet about it for some reason. This has me baffled as they are usually up front about things like this. Am not expecting a fix, but MS acknowledging the problem would make it easier for people to believe me when I state the problem. Am defragging with Diskeeper. The only hard drive I have that may present the 128GB data problem is 200GB, have repartitioned and formatted NTFS type 3 for XP use. This is the hard drive I found the problem with 98 and ME. Tried all kinds of partition sizes, even two partitions FAT32 totallying120GB, and remainder NTFS type 3, didn't solve it. SignatureJonny Signature@---}-- Laura..... :) Liverpool, England : > >Please read the last sentence in the "caution" on the bottom of the : weblink [quoted text clipped - 27 lines] : Tried all kinds of partition sizes, even two partitions FAT32 : totallying120GB, and remainder NTFS type 3, didn't solve it. >Neither Ron can't really confirm what I'm saying about this. MS has been >terribly quiet about it for some reason. This has me baffled as they are [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] >Tried all kinds of partition sizes, even two partitions FAT32 >totallying120GB, and remainder NTFS type 3, didn't solve it. If you read through the various articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base regarding Scandisk and Defrag you can put together the picture from the bits and pieces mentioned in the different articles. The origin of the problem seems to be that Scandisk and Defrag were written in such a way that there are limits on the size of internal tables etc. The operations of these utilities requires that they construct a table in memory with one entry for each cluster on the drive, and when there are more than 4.1 million (2^22) total clusters the size of the required table exceeds the capabilities of the program. Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada SignatureMicrosoft MVP (1997 - 2006) On-Line Help Computer Service http://onlinehelp.bc.ca > >Neither Ron can't really confirm what I'm saying about this. MS has been > >terribly quiet about it for some reason. This has me baffled as they are [quoted text clipped - 21 lines] > > Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada Understood. The problem I'm speaking of occurs without use of defrag or scandisk. And, requires further association with the partition and filesystem capabilities of the OS. Too much assumption. MS needs to do a KB article on this problem specifically. Again, am not expecting a fix, just a MS official explanation. They will probably remain silent as the support time period is soon to expire is my personal estimation. SignatureJonny |
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