Trouble installing Win95 on 15 Gig drive

[MidiGuy]

I just purchased a 15 Gig Maxtor hard drive for a friend and I'm installing it in his computer. Using the Maxtor utility, everything looks fine. But when I''m going through the Win95 installation, I eventually get to a point where it says there was an error in formatting the partition and Windows 95 cannot be installed on the system.

Is it possible for me to install Win95 on this hard drive with a single, 15 gig partition? And if so, what is required?

Thanks,

-MidiGuy

 

[Jeff7]

I usually just use Fdisk and then Format. I also recall having problems with Maxtor's utility; I don't bother with those customized things anymore. Fdisk and format do a fine job.

 

[MidiGuy]

I did just start messing with fdisk, but for some reason the partition comes out to only 14307 MB (or something around that). It says there is no space for an extended partition after that. Is that all I can use?

 

[gosstech]

Your problem is that Windows 95 does not support FAT 32. FAT 32 can have any size partition. You must use Fat 16, and FAT 16 partitions are 2 gigs or smaller. Try using the Maxtor utility again and see if there is an option to use FAT 16. Make your partitions 2 gigs each. You might be able get away with one large partition by running easy BIOS which comes with the Maxtor utility.

 

[MidiGuy]

That's true, but Win95 OSR2 does support FAT32. I assumed this copy that my friend has is OSR2 because it says "with USB support" right on the CD-ROM. How can I check and make sure that it is OSR2?

 

[AndyHui]

As long as it says that it has USB Support, it will be OSR2 and will support FAT32.

Hard drive manufacturers calculate space according to 1,000,000 bytes = 1MB, not 2^20 = 1MB. A "15GB" drive works out to be really about 14.3GB, as you have found with FDISK.

 

[MidiGuy]

So does that mean that there's no way to really use 15 full gigs?

 

[AndyHui]

The 14.3GB is the full 15GB...

The measurements used by hard drive manufacturers are a little misleading.

 

[MidiGuy]

Ok, thanks! The installation is working now.

Thanks for you help everyone!