Largest Partition for Windows 98 and 98se

[Mizer]

My co-worker is installing a 80Gb hard drive in his Windows 98 system and he tells me that '98 isn't recognizing it. This is all information I have right now and I don't know if he has 98 or 98se.

 

[AndyHui]

Depends on a number of factors.

Need to make sure motherboard BIOS handles drives over 64GB. Many do not without an update for BIOSes pre-2001.

FDISK that ships with Win98 can handle drives up to 64GB before they do a display glitch. They will display an 80GB drive as 16GB or so (80GB-64GB). Simply use percentages to partition.

FAT32 itself will handle partition sizes up to 128GB, as will Win98(SE) itself.

 

[rkoenn]

I had a experience with this this last weekend. Put an 80 GB in a guys machine using 98. Sure enough, reported something like 1 GB as available in Fdisk. I thought this was odd. Partitioned as two drives using 50% each and then they showed 40GB each as should be. The final oddity, similar to an NTFS drive, is that after formatting the two logical drives I looked at the Fdisk information and it showed the two 40s along with a small 1 Mb or so partition. I have noticed that NTFS always has a small, usually about 8 mb, partition that seems unusable by anything else, apparently reserved for NTFS use? I have always been curious about this storage area that is "set aside" and unusable and now this 98 experience makes me think it might be used for file system maintenance or something. If anyone knows the answer to this I would be interested in hearing what this is, for NTFS and 98.

 

[rkoenn]

By the way, forgot to tell you that if your motherboard BIOS won't handle such a big drive, you can get a utility that either came with the drive or from the manufacturer's website that will load a preboot large drive handling utility so the system can use the full capacity. I stay away from these if possible but with some machines it is the only solution. You need to install it prior to running Fdisk and format, etc.

 

[Mizer]

Thanks for the help "AndyHui" and "rkoenn". I didn't know about the "64 GB glitch" under Windows 95, 98 and 98se ; if anyone needs the patch or would like to read more about it -click on the Microsoft Link.

 

[AndyHui]

The 8MB left over part is used for conversion from Basic to Dynamic Disks under Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Dynamic disks have some interesting features, but are not recommended unless you REALLY need those features.