Large Hard Drive

Point value changed by question poster.

you got these things affecting your ability to use all that space:
BIOS limitions (get new ide controller card) the speed will be noticable and worth the $$.
fdisk limitations (get fdisk patch from support.microsoft.com or use other partitioning utility like partition magic)
file system limitations (use win98 osr2 so you have fat32 ('large drive') support)
you could to to western digital and get drive overlay software. but the new controller is the way to go.

You could try with commercial software like Partition Magic, though you have to be carefull because it is a very powerfull application.

Microsoft has a newer version of Fdisk that supports drives up to 137GB on W98

http://tinyurl.com/17uf

You may need to use Western Digital's DataLifeguard Tools to set up the drive and have it function properly under W98.

Only Windows XP SP1 has native support for hard drives larger than 137GB.

Chas

go to the Western Digital web site and download there HD software. There software I believe is called ez drive. What it does is a HD format utility and if the bios doesn't see the whole drive then it installs a drive overlay program to enable use of the whole drive.

If you are trying to create a single partition for that drive you will need to upgrade to Windows 2000 and format the drive NTFS.

A newer fdisk, as another, has stated will support up to 137 gig but Format has some limitations,in fat and fat32, on the number of clusters on a volume. This is just the nature of the OS.

At a dos prompt, type: help format and press enter/return. You will get a full description of the limitations of the fat, fat32, and ntfs. In most cases exceeding the numbers found in the help, format will actually halt and issue an error message.

Exceeding the guidelines found in this help file will result in an unstable storage device.

Hope this helps

Good Luck Lee

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