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Partition sizes in NT4

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by bob the builder

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We know from Microsoft about the limitations of partition sizes in NT4 ( approx 8Gb)but recently I have been doing a new ghost image for my company at home and found that the FAT16 partition can be 4095Mb (When ghosted back to the PC) and if I want an NTFS system partition when ghosting the image back to the PC I can span the entire HDD (>10Gb) with a single NTFS partition. I had no problems with booting up the PC, all aplications worked fine. I obviously only created the correct sized partitions so as not to void any support situations. Has anyone else tried this and what were the results?

5 replies

by xxx123

The 8 GB limit is for Windows 98, 95 and maybe ME - - I'm not sure.

An NTFS partition on NT 4 can be as large as you want it to be.

by abrar hazarika

Hi Bob,

The hard drive size limitation is there for 7.8GB and above that NT cant identify it.

Also the NT setup program is weird 16 bit process which cannot format partitions more than 4095 MB but from inside NT we can format much larger sizes(in TB's). I faced this problem (of bigger than 4GB) once and it seems you must have had the same.

That is, if I am not drastically wrong!!!

regards

Abrar

by dukebytes

NT has limitations as to what IT can used during setup for the system partition.

But the caveat here is that you are using Ghost to do the install. Ghost doesn't have a problem with int13 like NT does. And I bet it would work different for you on different machines - ie IDE or SCSI, diff types of SCSI etc....

NT is giving you the 4 gig FAT16 with the Ghost image - but Ghost is giving you the 10Gig NTFS partition during the "install". If you tried to setup this machine from an NT CD - you would get a 4 gig NTFS system partition and that would be it...

I have needed to have a bigger sys partition on an NT system before and have gotten around it by doing something like this - but it wasn't ghost - I don't remember what it was - but we "copied" the sys partition to an existing 18 Gig NTFS partition - modified the boot.ini file and the booted from the 18gig and deleted the 4 gig and it worked. It's not really NT doing anything. Just the program that is used. NT just needs toknow where it is booting from - not really the size etc...

Duke

Duke

by randyf25

Even though they recommend against it, you can use utilities like Partition Magic to increase the system partition past the normal Windows NT limitations. I have done it in the past. I am not sure of any adverse affects, however I no longer botherwith it. I find that installing all applications to the larger secondary partition minimized the use of the highly valuable "c:" drive. Thus a 20GB drive is partitioned at 8GB and 12GB. I've yet to run into disk space problems.

by pcman223

We have used Ghost to image 750 Clients. It is true that you can only set the original boot partition to 4 GB during the NT 4.0 setup install and then make the remainder of the drive NTFS. But, you can then modifiy this during the Ghost image process if you like to up to 8 GB in size for the boot partition. The catch to all of this is that if you have an HP Vectra VL400 series box or other proprietary PC manufacturers box it might not work due to the factory hardware and drivers. We have found that on HP Vectra VL400 boxes we can go up to 6 GB in size for the boot partition if we want to without causing any BSOD screens or other system instabilities.

Dan Johnson

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