Hardrive partition

[Doods]

could someone tell me what the largest partition you can put on windows 98se me and xp. or is there any limit.thanks.

 

[SUOrangeman]

All versions of Windows with a proper implementation of FAT32 (Win95C up through 98, 2K, ME, & XP) have a theoretical maximum filesystem size of 4TB ... or 4096GB, I think. Some like 2 to the 32nd power, as we are in a 32-bit OS.

Unfortunately, pre-ATA133 IDE hardware is limited to ?12?-bit addressing (I may be off on the 12), which limits things to about 127GB. So, technically, entire IDE drivers up to 120GB in size can be partitioned as one volume.

I'm sure there is an FAQ that explains this more precisely than I.

-SUO

 

[|TOAST|]

Yes, with FDisk and Win95 OSR2 and Win9x and later OS's I believe FAT32 partitions could be created up to 127GB. With Win2K the FAT32 parition limit creation is 32GB (don't know why but it can read/access/mount the FAT32 basic disks created from aforementioned Win9x FDisk creations over 32GB up to 127GB). FAT16 for any Win9x and FDisk creation was limited to 2GB and for NT3.5, NT3.51 and NT4.0 you could create 4GB FAT16 partitions (by setting 64K cluster sizes) but these could not be created under FDisk for Win9x (such as win98se or winME) but could be made accessible/mounted by Win9x. I haven't played around with WinXP enough yet (since I don't believe in using M$ products before their second to fourth Service Pack). The Links are here and here.

So to recap (and I assume NTFS 5 is used on XP OS's so that restrictions for XP are the same as Win2K although I don't know for certain and I remember reading somewhere that XP NFTS version is probably a slight updated version of NTFS 5 for Win2K since it has a few more attributes you can set for files and folders mainly in the multimedia classification) :

Upper limit on parition size:

FAT16 = 2GB for Win3.11,Win95(all versions),Win98(all versions),WinME
FAT16 = 4GB (using 64K cluster sizes with 128 sectors per cluster) NT 3.5,NT3.51,NT4.0 (accessible to Win2K and WinXP and Win9x)
FAT32 = 127GB created by Fdisk with Win95 (OSR2 and upwards or WIN95b and Win95c),Win98(all versions),WinME (accessible/mounted for Win2K,WinXP)
FAT32 = 32GB created Win2K,WinXP (accessible to all WIN OS's that can read/create 127GB FAT32 partitions)
Supposedly (have not confirmed this) FAT16 = 8GB (128K clusters and 256 sectors per cluster) for NT4 only
Supposedly (have not confirmed this) FAT16 = 16GB (128K clusters and 512 sectors per cluster) for NT4 only
NTFS = 2EB (Exabytes or 2^60 bytes or 2 billion gigabytes I believe since it goes 1024 gigabytes=1 terabyte and 1024 terabytes = 1 petabyte and 1024petabytes = 1 exabyte)

I could be wrong on some of this but I think this is the correct information.

 

[|TOAST|]

Oh, and one more thing (besides link to 2 Exabyte maximum for NTFS)) is that with basic disks (disks accessbile to FDisk or Win9x, NT3.5, NT3.51, NT4.0 and Win2K and WinXP) you can create a maxium of 4 primary partitions or 3 primary paritions and 1 Extended parition that contains 1 or more logical drives. I don't remember the logical drive limitation for FDisk Extended partitions but I think its like 3 or 6. Not quite sure but maybe someone else here will remember. With Win2K (and I'm assuming you can do this with WinXP) you can create an NTFS Dynamic Disk whre you can add space either "unpartitioned" or unused on the existing hard drive disk or a new one just installed into the machine and extend the space and size of any volume/"partition" you want. These are not called parititions anymore but volumes (hence the quotes) since they are changeable in size after initial creation. These volumes can only be acessed/read by Win2K (and probably WinXP). Partitions from basic disks can only be extended in size using mount points in Win2K (again, assuming same functionality in WinXP) but creating a partition on usused space either on the current hard drive or a newly installed one with unused/unallocated/unpartitioned space. You just make an empty folder in the existing drive you want to extend the space for and then set it to be mounted to a newly created and formatted (no files or folders existing on it) basic disk partition (can be either logical in the extended partition or a primary partition I believe).