Win98SE and a large hard drive

[Ruler2112]

I've finally gotten my new PC pulled together and have been trying to install OSs on it. I've run into a problem that I'm hoping somebody here will have some insight on.

I have a Western Digital 120 gig 7200 rpm SE hard drive. I know it's being reported correctly by my BIOS because fdisk under Linux can see the entire thing. However, the Windoze fdisk reports the the drive as being 48935 megs, with 45185 available for an extended partition.

I figured fine, MS fdisk doesn't recognize big drives, I'll do it in a real OS. So I created the 85 gig extended partition in Linux and rebooted. Only problem is that Windoze fdisk then reports the drive size as 17 megs, with 8 available for the extended partition.

I've checked the MS web site for information, but their search engine brings up just about everything except for what I'm looking for and half the pages I try to get to aren't available. I've googled for the max partition size under win98, but only find references to the 2TB limit on FAT32.

Could somebody help? (I've been trying to get this PC to work for almost 2 months and still can't use it! )

[Tomteriffic]

I don't have it handy, but there is a patch for Windoze 98 to allow fdisk to see up to about 120 gigs. Took a mess of searching on the M$ website to find it, though.

[John Prophet]

Have you done windows updates for it? Possibly there is something in those 5 years pf updates for w98se that would address the issue.

I have a 200G drive for sale and it says on the side that windows XP or W2000 sp3 is needed for drives above 137g or else one has to use the included ATA133 pci card. So going by that you would think you would be straight up to 137g.

One thing you could do is use Norton Ghost to copy your build onto a spare hard drive..then re-ghost it back onto your 120G drive at which point it would fill in the remaining space.

Or just try to find an fdisk replacement..there are several freeware fdisk type programs to be found.

I dont know the particulars but I know that the Msoft fdisk is limited in size capability.

JP

[John Prophet]

try www.bootdisk.com

I would almost guess that they even have an explanation about fdisk limitations somewhere on that site...and that is where I got my fdisk replacement but I cant remember the exact differences.

JP

[John Prophet]

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...k_80g_10g.html


http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q263044


Did your drive come with partitioning software??

Can you get your hands on an WinME bootdisk?

JP

[Ruler2112]

Thanks guys. Bootdisk.com has a link to the second link John Prophet posted, which describes in general the problem I'm having. I'm downloading it now and will try it out this evening.

You guys are the best.

[Ruler2112]

Downloading that patch and installing it did indeed solve the problem. Had to enter the %age of the drive, as you can't type that many characters into the field, but at least it works.