Windows 98 install

[Warder45]

I haven't installed windows 98 in a long time so I'm having trouble remembering a lot of the tricks you needed to do with it.

The guys machine I'm working with has a 20gb hard drive in it, but no matter what options I check in the install when all is said and done windows only recognizes 5gb of it. He was able to find the windows 98se upgrade disk and I tried that as well but it still only see's 5gb.

Is there something I'm missing? Also it's stuck with the Fat32 file system, was there a way to use NTFS?

Thanks to anyone who remembers any of this stuff.

EDIT: I should add that the bios see's 20gb, and useing the win98 boot disk (fdisk tool), it see's the windows install as 19592 Mbytes.

 

[networkman]

The Win9x series (& Windows Me) are incapable of reading/writing NTFS partitions - FAT32 is as far as you can go.

 

[RebateMonger]

I don't recall any BIOS or Windows 98 issues that occur at a 5GB barrier.

Are you saying that, if you:
Create a Windows 98 System Boot floppy
Boot to the floppy and run FDISK
Create a 20GB partition
Reboot to the floppy and run Format c: /s to format the 20GB partition to FAT32
Insert the Windows 98 CD and run Setup.exe to install Windows 98 on the hard drive

And when you are done, you only have a 5GB drive?

 

[imported_Kiwi]

It isn't the OS causing the 5 GB's error. Windows98se can work with partitions as large as 127 GB's, if you create the partitions with something other than the Fdisk that came with Win98. You have a setting in the BIOS that is wrong. Are you sure that you chose the "LBA" option there? There is a utility that you can use inside of Windows98 that will allow it to see and use files on a separate NTFS partition, but the OS itself must be on a FAT partition of some sort.

 

[Warder45]

Rebatemonger - yes, after I've done that, in windows it says for the C drive, 252mb used(approx) and 4,453mb free (approx).

Everything but windows 98 seems to see the 20gb HD. I even installed Partition magic 6.0 on there to try and force it to use the extra space, but Partition magic see's the 20gb's and so there's nothing for it to expand. Maybe it's some glitch with the "my computer" reporting and he will actually have 20gb of space.

I could find it but is there a disk management tool in windows98?

I guess it might be time to tell him to upgrade to winXP.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Warder45
I guess it might be time to tell him to upgrade to winXP.

Well, personally, I can no longer STAND working with Windows 98. Besides security and other issues, it's a pain to reconfigure networking in '98. Most '98 boxes can handle XP if you have adequate memory. The Retail XP Home Upgrade package is $90 or less. I'd go for that if the computer can handle it. (I draw the limit at roughly 500MHz and 128MB of RAM).