Win98 FDISK & Western Digital 80GB WD800JB

[Kartman]

Hello All,

I ran into an interesting little problem. Just built a new PC and installed a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB drive. Booted from a Win98 boot floppy and ran FDISK. The maximum size of the disk being reported by this version of FDISK is 10,737 MB, or about 1/8th what it should be. Went in the board's (IT7) BIOS and tried LBA, Large, and Auto, but the end result is the same.

Not really caring as I planned on installing XP (don't even know why I popped that floppy in in the first place), but the XP install recognized the disk for what it is. Using the XP CD, I created a 40GB partition, formatted NTFS, and installed away!

Anyone know why Win98 (Dos) FDISK would report such a low value? All my other drives are 20GB or smaller.

 

[AndyHui]

The FDISK supplied by Windows 98 can address hard drive sizes up to 64GB. At sizes above 64GB, it reports drives as being their size less 64GB.

Since an 80GB drive is approximately 76GB in binary terms, the number you are seeing is about right.

You can correctly partition the drive using percentages as opposed to absolute sizes.

You can obtain the updated version of FDISK which addresses larger hard drive sizes at the end of my FAT32 vs NTFS FAQ.

 

[Kartman]

Nah, thats ok. I went and installed XPpro cleanly. I was just curious, and you pretty much explained the condition at hand.

 

[Sukhoi]

Thanks for the link AndyHui! I was just going to post this question.