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Maximum numbrs of partitions?

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by liemt

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What is the maximum amount of partitions can I have for windows 98(fat32), windows NT(NTFS) and windows 2000? Is there any known limit of data capacity on transfers for IDE drives? Some one told me once Fat32 only can send up to 3.8GB at one time and NTFS can send 7.8GB of data at one time. Is this true? can someone confirm this please.

7 replies

by astrocat123

theroticaly there is no limit in any of them but you need a certain amount of space for the boot sequence and of course the operating system it self, the bigger the drive capacity the more sectors, or partions.as for transfer rates that depends on the speed of the drive, mhz of the proccessor, side bus mhz, memory, type of mother board,and even such factors as the bios and bios settings.for small file transfers 1-10mb you should see transfer rates of 21X (3215 kb a second) for larger file transfers 10-300mb you should see trasfer rates of 107x (16093 kb a second) hope this helped

by liemt

Thanks for the repsonse, however Well Im not really talking about the transfer speed of the data. Im talking about if there any limitation on the transfer size in capacity mb or gb? Im getting users we states when they try to transfer a foldermore than 8gb under windows 2000 to another physical hard drive it crashes. But if they transfer less than 8gb then its ok. Any suggestions what may be the problem?

by bohicam1

maximum partitions is 23 as there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and A,B, and C are already reserved for your floppies and your system (C:\)
The reason that you cannot have partitions greater than 8 GB's (in both fat32 and NTFS) has to do with the FAT itself. Your File Allocation Table is simply an addressing scheme much like a telephone or address book. It can only support so many entries as it can only be so big and each physical sector on your hard drive must have an address in this FAT table. From what I have read, you can get around this limitation by making an upgrade to your bios.

by 1stladytech

I have never had a problem moving data from one hdd to another, with either Fat32 or with NTFS. I have used both to copy 40 and 80 gig on info from one hdd to another in the same system. We move customers data back and forth all the time with no crashes or losses.

Vickie

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