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Bootable Partition size in NT

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10 replies

by severini

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I have a HP 900 laptop that somehow has a boot partition of 9.72gigs. How is that possible? I thought NT only allowed a maximum boot partition of up to 8gigs. I am using the NT unattended install and it is configured to make the boot partition (c: drive) the "default" size. This is the only machine I have seen this on. I have not been able to find anything on technet except that the NT boot partition is limited. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

10 replies

by mckaytech

TechNet has a boringly complete explanation of how the boot partition limitations are derived (article #Q114841) and the limit technically is 7.8gig. However, it would appear that if the disk sectors are something other than the standard 512 bytes,other answers are possible.

My guess is that your BIOS is doing some translation between the actual hard drive geometry and the CMOS geometry (possibly involving sector size) and that what you're seeing is actually a reporting issue rather than NT spontaneously freeing itself from hard-coded constraints.

It would be interesting to know if this 9.72gig figure is consistently reported by Disk Administrator, My Computer, etc.

paul

by curlergirl

Was this partition possibly created by another install of NT or by another operating system prior to installing NT? In the case of an already-existing partition, NT will (sometimes, anyway) ignore the standard limitations.

by terminator

If you format your hardrive on NTFS (8G or more),on a diferent computer you can then move to a pc and install boot partition on it, and some partition utility(hardware manufactures has got even better utils than partition magic) can format a boot partition to more than 8G

by pasi.moilanen

First of all your BIOS must recognize your HD correctly. Then you must obtain updated atapi.sys driver from Microsoft. After that it is possible to install NT on a disk larger than 8G. When installing you should choose to specify mass storage deviceyourself and then you put disk with updated atapi.sys driver in drive a. I have tried once and it worked for me.

by logic2 tech

I don't completely understand all this yet, but I read yesterday that partition sizes can be up to 16 exebytes with NTFS
Maybe explain this to me
mmcmillan@arkansasusa.com
thanks much

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