Win98 2Gb hard drive limit

[Errol]

I've just formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Win98 and my
DiamondMax 20Gb hard drive only registers as 2Gb in Windows. Does
anyone have any tips as to correct this without partitioning my hard
drive?

[eek-a-mouse]

In article <3ae35a2b...@news.massey.ac.nz>, "Errol"
<E.S....@massey.ac.nz> wrote:

AFAIK you will have to start again
auto-detect your drive in the BIOS screen, check the capacity there
boot from setup floppy
fdisk
delete primary partition, make primary partition, answer yes to large
hard disk support (fat 32) You can check the capcity in the subsequent
steps
reboot
install Windoze
But I recommend that you do a primary partition of 2Gb and the rest as a logical drive in the
extended partition as a D: drive for the rest, then its easy to back up
to the D: partition and reinstall again :-)

[Errol]

The BIOS detects the 20 Gb hard drive with no problem. Another thing
I realised was that I have a Pentium III 800 Mhz processor that is
detected by the BIOS but Win98 says it is running a Pentium II, any
ideas?

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:44:56 +1200, "eek-a-mouse" <e...@mouse.xx>
wrote:

[Errol]

Is there any way without using FAT 32, or is this neccessary for the
larger hard drives?

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:44:56 +1200, "eek-a-mouse" <e...@mouse.xx>
wrote:

>In article <3ae35a2b...@news.massey.ac.nz>, "Errol"

[Errol]

It's not an old MoBo, and it does have LBA support.

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 11:45:47 +1200, Angel of Paradise..
<rog...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:44:56 +1200, "eek-a-mouse" <e...@mouse.xx> wrote:
>

>He Could have a Old MoBo with out LBA support..
>
>

[Bret]

"Angel of Paradise.." wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:44:56 +1200, "eek-a-mouse" <e...@mouse.xx> wrote:
>

> He Could have a Old MoBo with out LBA support..

LOL, learn to read Roger

[Bret]

Errol wrote:

> Is there any way without using FAT 32, or is this neccessary for the
> larger hard drives?
>

> The limit of Fat 16 is 2Gig, so it'll have to be Fat 32.

[Chris Martin]

If you formatted it to FAT (FAT16) then the maximum
partition size is 2GB, you can have up to four partitions
making a total of 8GB. If you format it to FAT32 then the
partition size is (for all intents and purposes) unlimited.
Other filesystems such as Linux ext2 also have no
practical limit on partition size. NTFS lets you have 4GB
partitions I think, since it allows a cluster size of 64KB
instead of FAT's maximum of 32KB.

There is a way to correct your problem (assuming it's
formatted to FAT16) without reformatting. There are tools
available (there's one bundled with Win98, Partition Magic
can also do it I think) that can convert FAT16 partitions to
FAT32. This is possible since FAT32 clusters are smaller,
going in the other direction is next to impossible since
you'd probably run out of clusters. Once you've converted
your primary partition to FAT32 you can increase its size,
making it take up the entire drive if you want, using
Partition Magic (there are other tools that can do this, but
PM is the most well-known and easy to use).

Others have suggested LBA support being the problem,
I doubt this. The limits on hard disk size imposed by the
BIOS are normally 528MB or 8GB.

[Errol]

What about using windows FAT32 Converter?

[Chris Martin]

That's the one bundled with Win98 that I mentioned.

>What about using windows FAT32 Converter?
>

[Kristofer Clayton]

>I did a conversion on a small 1.3g Hard drive to FAT 32 and gained
>200 megs..

This is because FAT32 uses smaller clusters per file (usually around
4K instead of 32K but it depends on the size of the partition) which
is awesome for those gazillion-or-so 1KB files that windows creates
which will now only take up 4KB of space each instead of 32KB (which
can add up to 200 megs :))

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Kristofer Clayton (KJClayton)
Gisborne, New Zealand
E-Mail: ks...@j00spamm3r-ihug.co.nz

[enkidu]

Errol wrote:
>
> Is there any way without using FAT 32, or is this
> neccessary for the larger hard drives?
>

The short answer is no, you need FAT32.

Cheers,

Cliff

[enkidu]

Chris Martin wrote:
>
> NTFS lets you have 4GB partitions I think, since it
> allows a cluster size of 64KB instead of FAT's
> maximum of 32KB.
>

Nah, you can have NTFS partitions a lot bigger than that.
Up to an enormous number. But boot partitions, I think,
must start at less than 8Gb from the start.

Cheers,

Cliff

[Mr Scebe]

enkidu <enk...@cliffp.com> wrote in message
news:3AE3E6D1...@cliffp.com...

Basically. The boot drive partition can be up to 8.4Gb, and consequent
drives are can go much larger. I recently installed a RAID solution that had
mirrored 8Gb boot partitions, and a RAID5 35Gb data partition.

You can also set the cluster size as little as 512bytes.

--
Mr Scebe
~"The nature of monkey was irrepressible"

[Peter Ingham]

From memory...

NTFS Boot <= 8GB

Non-Boot NTFS <= 64TB

>
>Cheers,
>
>Cliff

--

Peter S Ingham pi...@actrix.gen.nz
Lower Hutt, New Zealand

[Robin]

"Angel of Paradise.." wrote:

> I did a conversion on a small 1.3g Hard drive to FAT 32 and gained
> 200 megs..

I chucked my 1.6Gig in the bin installed a 10Gig and gained 8.4Gig :-)

[Chris Martin]

My mistake, I was just guessing from the options I
saw in Partition Magic.

[Errol]

I converted my drive last night to FAT 32 an it stills registers as a
2Gb hard drive. I think I'll have to use Fdisk and start over again.

[Bret]

Errol wrote:

> I converted my drive last night to FAT 32 an it stills registers as a
> 2Gb hard drive. I think I'll have to use Fdisk and start over again.
>
> On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:26:07 GMT, E.S....@Massey.ac.nz (Errol) wrote:
>

> <snip>

Converting it wont change the size, try partition magic to resize the
partition.

[Chris Martin]

Of course it does, all you did was change the filesystem it
uses. Now you can stretch it to take up the rest of the 20GB
drive, using Partition Magic or something similar. There may
be free utilities available to do this, I'm not sure.

Errol wrote in message <3ae4b73b...@news.massey.ac.nz>...

[Sulla]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 23:14:44 GMT, E.S....@Massey.ac.nz (Errol) said:

>I converted my drive last night to FAT 32 an it stills registers as a
>2Gb hard drive. I think I'll have to use Fdisk and start over again.

Have you done a scandisk?

I have seen a similar problem, when W98 lost track of around 4GB on a 6GB
drive about a month old. Scandisk found a heap of lost clusters.
--
Onward and upward, the stars beckon, and judge.

[Matthew Gardiner]

Drop into dos using the Windows 98 boot disk, fdisk, delete partition,
reboot. boot using the boot disk, and say yes to large hard disk
support when you launch fdisk, create partition etc, and then reboot.
If that doesn't give any luck, email, or post the BIOS release date
(available on the start up screen), it it is before 1997, then you may
have problems, however, if it is relatively new, jump into BIOS and
ensure that the hard drive specs are auto so that they can dynamically
change if/when you change you drive next, plus it allows of more
accurate install and detection than manual entry.

Matthew Gardiner
--
Disclaimer:

I am the resident BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell)

If you don't like it, you can go [# rm -rf /home/luser] yourself

Running SuSE Linux 7.1

The best of German engineering, now in software form