best way to put a 40gb drive in a win98 machine?

[crazychicken]

my computer is XP. I am trying to put this 40gb drive i have in a windows 98 computer. can windows 98 handle NTFS? I know drives over 32gb have to be NTFS. What is the best way to either get it to 32gb Fat32 or to just make it work with win98. I got it to work with fdisk but only 8 gb... i can do 32 but not 8

any suggestions are appreciated

thanks
david

 

[Green Man]

The 8GB problem is most likely a BIOS limitation. You could look for a BIOS update. Although Win XP can only format up to 32GB partition in FAT32, Win98 doesn't have that limitation.

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: crazychicken
my computer is XP. I am trying to put this 40gb drive i have in a windows 98 computer. can windows 98 handle NTFS? I know drives over 32gb have to be NTFS. What is the best way to either get it to 32gb Fat32 or to just make it work with win98. I got it to work with fdisk but only 8 gb... i can do 32 but not 8

any suggestions are appreciated

thanks
david

Windows 98 is not compatible with NTFS - it can only use FAT16 or FAT32. Windows 98 does have large disk capacity so you can install it fresh and it will be able to create a 40 gb partition and format it no problem.

 

[loup garou]

1. Open computer
2. Put in hard drive


Actually, techwanabe nailed it. Just put it in and format it FAT32

 

[crazychicken]

actually i think spookyfish nailed it, seems to be a bios limitation
thanks for all the input!

david

 

[Joemonkey]

since when do drives over 32GB have to be NTFS???

 

[stevewm]

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
since when do drives over 32GB have to be NTFS???

That thought probably came about since Windows 2000 and XP will not let you format a volume with the FAT32 filesystem if its over 32GB.

When using a 32KB cluster size a FAT32 partition can be up to 8TB (Terabytes!) in size. (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=184006) However 32KB clusters are VERY inefficient. With 32KB clusters there would be so much fragmentation and wasted space the volume would not be of much use.

Microsoft limits 2k/XP by design, they want you to use NTFS and for good reasons.