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Formatting greater than 8Gb in NT 4

B

Bkanneg

Member
I am wanting to load Windows NT 4 on an old machine with a 9 gb drive in it. Do I have to partition it into two partitions, or can I have it as one large partition. Also, if I have to have it on two partitions, can they both be NTFS, or does the boot partition need to be FAT16?

Thanks,
Brian
 
They can both be NTFS. If you want to be daring, you can convert the boot partition to NTFS and use partition magic to resize it to the full size of the drive, but if any of the boot files get moved past the 1024 cylinder (~8G) mark NT will stop booting.
 
They can both be NTFS, but the boot volume will need to be 4gig max on NT (2k/XP removes this limit)
Bill
 
They can both be NTFS, but the boot volume will need to be 4gig max on NT (2k/XP removes this limit)

It's only limited to 4G by default because it formats it FAT then converts it later, if you use PQMagic you can get ~8G out of it but anything about that and you run the risk of hitting the 1024 cylinder bug they never fixed.
 
If you check with Microsoft they will Tell you that the boot partition should be 2gig (2048) and absolutley no bigger than 4gig or you risk NTFS corruption and ultimately a failure.
Now...I have about 25 machines running a single 9 gig drive...running NT4 with Service Pack 6a and the SP7 Security Rollout.
None have failed, but each time I talk to Premier support at Microsoft they cringe and tell me i need to get rid of that config....if so...they can come and rebuild the 25 pc's 🙂

I would stay at or below 4 gig, your second partition can be any size you want..its only the boot you have to worry about...
 
None have failed, but each time I talk to Premier support at Microsoft they cringe and tell me i need to get rid of that config....if so...they can come and rebuild the 25 pc's

As soon as a SP installation or some other system file update pushes a file past the 1024 cylinder mark that box will stop booting. We have a number of boxes with a single NTFS boot partition, not my idea, and regularly someone installs a patch for something and the thing stops booting, we have to break out Partition Magic and resize the drive down to get it to boot again.
 
Well...tons of software have been installed and they all boot just fine...course im no where near the hardrive limit, so im not too panicky..they are all going to Win2k soon =)
 
> It's only limited to 4G by default because it formats it FAT then converts it later, if you use PQMagic you can get ~8G out of it but anything about that and you run the risk of hitting the 1024 cylinder bug they never fixed.

Fat and the conversion is not the reason, the 1024 cylinder issue is. Not sure it's a bug, as it's documented as the max size (fat or ntfs). Just annoying now that we are in the age of 160gig drives! Your right you can use PQ to trick the system, but thats just asking for trouble.

Bill
 
Install drive as 2GB NTFS and expand the drive out using PQMagic.

I have been (or was😉) doing this with single partition sizes of >40GB. I first did this with PQMagic 3.0 with the patch, and have done it with EVERY subsuquent release. As the drives had become larger so did the NTFS partition.

It is quite frustrating to setup an NT Server or Workstation and then start running into problems with programs that need to install files on the primary partition by default. Pretty soon that "large" multi-gigabyte partition is in need of some maintenance.
 


<< I am wanting to load Windows NT 4 on an old machine with a 9 gb drive in it. >>



I suppose it's a scsi hdd.
some people don't reccomend using those as boot disks in workstations. I don't know their reasons, but mine is to reduce hdd usage. so I put the boot on an ide drive (3 gigs wd) an kept the scsi as the work drive. and on nt4, I don't think a faster hdd for boot would make the difference. also, partitioning the hdd increases hdd usage when using 2+ partitions at the same time (U figure out why).
 
Fat and the conversion is not the reason, the 1024 cylinder issue is.

But 1024 cylinders comes out to ~8G on most drives.

Not sure it's a bug, as it's documented as the max size (fat or ntfs)

It's not necessarily a bug, but LBA32 access has been around for a while now and they could add the feature to the bootloader probably without too much trouble.
 


<< It's not necessarily a bug, but LBA32 access has been around for a while now and they could add the feature to the bootloader probably without too much trouble. >>



I doubt ms will release anything but security patches for nt4. I mean

<< Want to Go Fast? Windows XP Professional Will Set You Free >>

is the first thing you read when enter the nt4 area at microsoft.com.
 
I know they won't, because they're more concerned with getting paid for the new OS than supporting the old one. Such is life, when you choose a commercial OS =)
 
more partitions are better in case something goes wrong with one... learn from unix, its better that way

but with unix the filesystem everything is seamless, no max 24 drives because of stupid drive letters, no paths getting screwed up because of drive letters, etc.
 
Isn't there a fix for this?

I remember downloading a Microsoft patch that replaced the ATAPI.SYS file with the newer SP4 ATAPI.SYS file which eliminated the 8GB size limit. You put it on a floppy, and then hit F5 to specify a mass storage device during setup.

But I can't remember if that allowed me to actually create partitions larger than 8 GB, or just to see all of my 20 GB disk... If all it did was the latter, then I suppose it was pretty worthless!
 
I had this same problem on a Gateway 9300 laptop.
NT4 sp5 and (1) 30GB partition, worked well for a while (8 months) then one day just didnt boot up, stopped after bios check.
full drive verified in BIOS so I use PQ Magic 6 to resize to 7.2GB (C) and the rest (D) and it booted right up.

every machine that comes in gets a 7GB (C) and the rest (D)

Even though they come preloaded with 2k, they wipe them and put NT4 sp5 on them, (1.7,256,20gb, Compaq EVO's), kinda behind the times I think
 
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