Re: Windows 98 Se Max Hard Drive Size
Carim Jennings
Hi, was wondering if anyone might know offhand what is the maximum internal hard disk size that Windows Me will accept? On my current classic/retro PC gaming rig, I think I have a 120GB IDE/PATA hard drive installed, which Windows Me accepts with no problems and with the full partition size, so I was thinking about purchasing a few extra backup internal drives for when the existing hard drive starts to go bad or fails. Since my computer accepts the 120GB size, does anyone know if it is possible to go higher, say 250GB or 320GB? My classic gaming box is an HP Vectra VE6 Series 8 Minitower PC, with 384MB RAM and a 333MHz Pentium II processor.
For that hardware, I'd be more worried about what the motherboard BIOS supports than I would with Windows Me. Back in the P2 days, the BIOS limit was usually 137GB. Good luck with your search. I got lucky finding a pair of working 40GB drives for my P2 Win98 rebuild.
I have an 8Tb drive where I store my dropbox files on my Windows computer and despite setting all files to be 'online only' as well as going to Dropbox preferences and setting select sync to not sync any folders I am still getting the message "Can't sync not enough free space". In my system settings it appears the files are still taking up space on my "Apple" drive where I have drobox downloaded and have set it to sync to (I have less than 200GB of non-dropbox data on that Apple drive).
I had this problem on my Mac a year ago and solved it by checking the box on the website to not have online files take up hard drive space. I've done the same for my PC. I have unlimited space on my dropbox account. I have updated Dropbox to the latest version (released December 21st 2021). I have read through every relevant online article and forum I could find. So now I am here.
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I believe I have been using Smart Sync (where I would select which folders were local or online only). I selected all of the folders and set them to online only. Then after that wasn't clearing up space, I went to Selective Sync in my settings and unchecked all the folders there.
Sorry for the delayed response. Last week I tried deleting a bunch of files on the internal drive however Dropbox still gave me the error (however I'm not sure if I completely quit and restarted Dropbox then).
Since then I uninstalled dropbox completely, and the second I did that a bunch of 'ghost' dropbox files appeared (I'm using 'ghost' cause I don't know what else to call them, my computer thinks they're taking up space even though I can't open them and they are unreadable). My computer thought these dropbox files were taking up >100Tb of space (see attached picture) which is impossible on my 8Tb drive. The size of 110Tb does make sense given it's from my business partner's shared folder and we have a lot of data on there, however to my knowledge none of those shared folders were ever downloaded or selected to be synced on this drive.
I believe these ghost files (which had never showed up on my computer before) were the primary reason for my computer/dropbox to think there was space being taken up. I know this was a problem on Mac (in terms of offline files appearing to take up space), is there a way to fix this on Windows? I would love to reinstall dropbox but worry that it will take over my computer again.
My E drive is internal. When I tried reinstalling dropbox and having the folders online (after a couple days of waiting for Dropbox to sync) I ran into the same error "cannot sync not enough disk space", however there's still several terrabytes of free space on the disk.
I thought for a second it might be because the disk is damaged, however when I ran some repair software it said it wasn't. I'll look more into this (maybe uninstall Dropbox and reinstall it on a different disk).
Just thought I'd jump in here to say that I use Smart Sync on at least two thirds of the stuff I have in Dropbox, and it still says my hard drive is 90% full, and Online Only files that cannot be opened when Dropbox is off show up as the biggest files in WinDirStat.
WizTree makes it very easy to locate and remove "Space hogs" from your hard drive. The visual tree map displays the sizes of all of your files visually, helping you to quickly locate large files and folders.
WizTree is free for personal use. However you can help support further development and use it commercially by purchasing a "Supporter Code". Large organisations should purchase an Enterprise license for unlimited use.
I don't know exactly how you guys handle your partition and drive sizes in Windows 98 SE but here is what I have found from my recent experiences. None of which affected me back when we all actually used Windows 98 SE as our primary operating system because hard drives just weren't big enough to be a problem, at least not for me. I was using Windows 2000 Pro before I even got my first 40GB hard drive.
128GB seems to be the limit right, well not exactly from what I have encountered. Ok so first I limit a hard drive to exactly 128GB with the following method. I use SeaTools to tell a Seagate hard drive exactly how many sectors I want it to have. (Gigabytes Desired x 1024 x 1024 x 1024) / Hard Drive Sector Size. This is for an IDE 250GB Seagate hard drive with 512kb sectors. Honestly I am not 100% sure what happens with modern drives that have physical 4096kb sectors, if anything. So (128 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024) / 512 = 268435456 sectors. I use the updated FDISK.EXE from Microsoft for Windows 98 SE to handle drives larger than 64GB. Let's say I create a single 128GB partition and when I go to format it, format doesn't seem to understand how large it is. Microsoft says this is merely cosmetic and it will format it to 128GB properly and in fact it does. Now we install Windows 98 SE to that 128GB partition and everything looks fine. Let's say we decide to run Scandisk to verify the health of the drive, failure. Scandisk simply cannot handle the number of sectors (4,194,304 32kb FAT32 clusters ) and gives us an out of memory error. So I have decided to take the safe road and limit hard drive size to 127GB instead of 128GB, which is kind of funny because I sort of remember back in the day folks talking about 127GB limitation or maybe my mind is just making that up? I then use FDISK.EXE to create a 50% Primary DOS Partition and a 50% Extended DOS Partition. This keeps everything nice and happy within Windows 98 SE.
FYI, if I create a 128GB drive and a 64GB Primary DOS Partiton, then the Extended DOS Partition is a few megabytes over 64GB in reality and FORMAT.COM goofs up again so I consider it unsafe and just stick with 127GB total drive size.
I am ok with the cosmetic issue of FORMAT.COM not showing the proper size but the Scandisk issue bothers me. I want to know that I can take care of and repair the system as intended with the Windows 98 SE tools and boot disks.
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