1)i recently purchased a 80gb hdd. in the bios it shows 76351mb but when i begin to load win98se it show total disk space available as 10812mb. why does win98se not recognize by 80gb hdd. is there a special way to load a 80gb hdd.

2)when i try win xp home the drive size is recognized correctly but when i try to format it with fat32 i don not get any option for it. the only format available is with ntfs file system.

1) How did you prepare the drive for installing Windows. In other words how did you partition and format it? What partitions does fdisk see on the drive?

2) WinXP will only format FAT32 on partitions up to 32 GB in size. So if the partition you are formatting is over 32 GB then NTFS will be the only option. If you use a Win9X boot floppy to partition and format the drive beforehand you could have a single 80 GB FAT 32 drive ready in advance of running the WinXP setup and then direct the installation to install directly into that partition.

This is caused by a problem with the "fdisk.exe" program [where did I put that link?]
Here it is http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044
You need to download the fixed copy and replace the faulty version on your startup floppy [and also the 2 copies on the HDD].
fdisk is [in error] displaying the difference between your actual HDD size and 64GB.
i.e. 80 - 64 = 16Gb in PC-speak.

It affects Win98 1st & 2nd edition. It was fixed for WinME.
I fixed mine and it works ok now.

For what it's worth, I had 98se installed successfully on a 30g hdd. Just a week ago, I used Drive Copy 2002 to copy it to an 80g hdd, and 98se reads the entire 80g (76 or whatever). When I made the copy, I was curious if the entire 80g would be read, but sure enough, it was. It's an 80g wd special edition with 8mg of cache, and I gotta tell ya, I've never seen 98se run faster or better. I have some games on it that my son likes and that seem to run better on 98se than XP. I'm having more fun that he is I think with how well 98se runs on this drive.

marty

Did you use fdisk to partition your 80GB HDD?

In my case, I remember that fdisk reported the size wrong, but cannot remember if that carried over into Windows. I expect it did.

No, I used Partition Magic 8, specifically the "emergency" floppy disks you create with the PM8.

With two members posting about 80 gig harddrives, I'm getting confused who's talking to who.. Alex, let's work with the author of the thread, ok?

Gotodreams,
If you want the entire drive as Fat 32 and there's already some of it as NTFS, you'll need to delete the NTFS with the XP disk first, then fdisk and format with a 9x boot floppy.

Alex,
I've never seen 98se run faster or better.
You want to see 98SE really fly? I've been using 8meg cache drives for awhile now and for an added boost, putting 98 on a small C: partition (2 gig or under) makes it even faster still!

"then fdisk and format with a 9x boot floppy."
He'd need to get the updated version of "fdisk.exe" first to replace the flawed copy on the Win9x startup floppy ["format.com" also has a flaw, but not such a serious one].

Edit: Fruss, it's easy to get distracted and somewhat off-topic from the original specific topic of the thread-starter, but it's certainly not unprecedented. In fact, I did it again in response to your comment about small partitions (see below, I noticed this after posting it and then re-reading your post). :o :o In any case, hopefully all of this is useful information to the original topic, i.e., there are different ways of formatting an 80g drive for 98se, and once formatted, one must consider partition sizes.

ou want to see 98SE really fly? I've been using 8meg cache drives for awhile now and for an added boost, putting 98 on a small C: partition (2 gig or under) makes it even faster still!

Intriguing. Could you explain that a bit more? It sounds like you've partitioned the hdd into one or more partitions, with one of them small (2 gig), and then installed 98 to that small partition. Is that correct? Just to be clear to this old brain. Right now, I only have one huge partion, and I don't use a storage drive with the 98se hdd, as it's a dedicated "old game" hdd.

What performance differences to you see? Significant real-world differences? Do you install all your programs on a separate partition then? I'd be curious, since right now that 98se hdd on my kt-600 is working quite well, and I'm a firm believer in "If it works, don't fix it".

I tried small partitions once before, with my old kt-333 soltek mobo. I had 98se on one small partition, XP on a second small partition, and then had two storage/program partitions for each OS. The problem I ran into for both 98se and XP partitions was eventually running out of space. It was very incremental, took about 6-8 months before I started getting the "out of space" messages. Trying to resize the partitions, but even with PM8, that was a bit of a problem (long story). I found myself spending lots of time deleting files, doing disk management. Interesting that I'm pretty sure the partition size I used for the 98se partition was 2g. Perhaps with my current setup as kind of a dedicated "old game" hdd, it wouldn't be a problem. I use the drive maybe 30% of the time, so it's not getting daily use and I'm not accumulating lots of junk via downloads, although I try to keep it up to date with virus protection, spyware protection, 98se updates, and such. It's running so well. I swear, of the four active computers in our household (old compaq with 98se, dell with XP, plus two self-builds [kt-600 and nforce2 400], the kt-600/98se combo gets the best internet performance. Go figure.

marty

Sylvander,
I had no trouble fdisking and partitioning a WD800JB HDD with a 98SE boot floppy made from my 98SE cd. Maybe Goto needs to make a new one?

Alex,
Yes making a small partition on the 8meg cache drives and installing an os onto it makes a very noticable difference in how fast the pc runs, from apps to games to page loads.

I install any program that does not insist on being in Program Files to the partition I downloaded it to. Then, any data also is not allowed onto the C: partition either. It's just like a car. I once had one that would do 115 mph with 2 people. Reduce that to 1 person and it would do 135! Same principle with pc's. Keep the burden down and it will perform better.

If I were gaming, I would puit the game on the C: (and make sure the C: is appropriately sized) so it wouldn't have to run through 2 partitions at once.

I was running 98 on a 700mb partition for awhile until Windows Updates and virus definitions just filled it up. Now I recommend ~2 gigs.

Fruss, do you then put your page file on a separate partition? That certainly would save some space on C:\. Also, what about a 3 or even 5g partition, does increasing it to those sizes quickly negate any gain in performance? What about multiple partitions, one for os, one for page file, one for storage or whatever.

I ask all this because I had been considering partitioning that drive so I could get the page file on a separate partition, and thus your experience with 2g partitions definitely caught my attention. Thanks.

marty

I've been keeping my C: partition small for years now. :)

The reasoning goes something like this:
1. Every cluster in a partition needs to be identified [numbered] in the File Allocation table.
2. If you use large partitions [and/or small clusters], that makes for HORRENDOUS numbers of clusters in the partition, each with its entry in the FAT. The 32-bit FAT makes more of these possible.
3. So not only does the FAT use lots of memory space, but more importantly, when a file is needed [especially if it is fragmented (not occupying contiguous clusters, and scattered all over the place)] every cluster has to be found in the ENORMOUS [File Allocation] table.
4. Since the table has to be searched [for every single cluster] every time a file is to be accessed, the increase in time taken to do that produces a significant decrease in speed.
5. Cutting down the partition size produces benefits in speed with no practical downside that I know of.
6. Increasing the cluster size tends to speed accesses, but makes for increased slack, so you need to strike a balance. Try to make the cluster sizes match the file sizes. You can see this as you defragment. How many clusters [the little rectangles] does a typical file occupy? It should be about 5 to 100 clusters to a file. Sometimes you'll see files occupying many thousands of clusters. Or 1kB files occupying 32kB clusters! That's 96% wasted space; 4% occupied! All those have to be found and put together every time those files are accessed.

And that's only one aspect.
Another is that if you separate the data [on D: E: F:] from the program files [on C:], you can reformat C: and restore one of the frequently made C: backups without losing the latest copies of your emails or address book etc.
You can backup each according to its peculiar needs.

Hopefully gotodreams will include such strategies once he gets his partitioning back on track. If he uses FAT32.

Edit: I did a quick google, and the question I posed below opens up a whole can of worms. I'll leave it, but it should really be in a thread of its own, not here, as it truly would detract from the original question in this thread, i.e., getting 98se on a 80g drive. There are lots of great sites out there that talk about various partitioning strategies.

marty

One question: does partitioning a hdd slow it down, at least for the OS, i.e., for maximum performance, should your OS be on an unpartitioned hdd, while storage, pagefile, etc can be on a separate hdd with their respective partitions? I've seen that claim from reputable sources, and my own personal experience backs that up.

It would be easy enough to test, as I can use PM8 to create a separate partition on my 98se 80g hdd for my pagefile, and if I do indeed take a hit in performance, I can simply remove the partition and keep the pagefile on drive C. Conversely, if there is a significant improvement in performance, I keep it partitioned. Actually, I could do this with the compaq system as well, which is simply sitting in a closet right now (but fully current on OS, virus, etc. updates as of a week ago).

marty

IMHO, tweaking the file system and the virtual memory have minimal noticeable direct effects on the speed of a modern system - even a system accessing a large FAT partition. DMA and cacheing being just two aspects of a modern set-up that means that the whole partition and its FAT tables are not searched through for every file i/o.

The most noticeable effects I have seen with HDDs has actually been quite simply there rotation speeds - with almost palpable changes noticeable when one jumps from 5400 to 7200 and once again to 10000 rpm. Many report that a large cache has made a difference for them though I have never found this to be a major benefit.

Nowadays most systems have loads of RAM and apart from the direct benefits this brings it also means less accessing of virtual memory and hence also less fragmentation as a consequence. Admitedly this can be minimised by keeping the pagefile/swapfile of a fixed size but fragmentation would generally cause a much greater reduction in function that having large partitions as such.

I don't like large partitions for the simple reason that it takes a long time to run utilities such as scandisk and defrag on them. The real benefits of partitioning are to do with good housekeeping and backup and recovery rather than of performance per se. There are also a number of good reasons for multi-partitions in a multi-boot environment for fairly obvious reasons. I would 100% go along with keeping ones DATA on a separate partition from the OS.

I agree with you Paul re. rpm and the current state of ram. Our old Compaq originally came with an 8g 5400 rpm seagate, a good nice drive. I upgraded to a 30g maxtor 7200, and wow. Huge difference. I noticed the same thing on my kt-600 when I updated from a good 7200 wd 80g se to the 74g raptor, huge difference. Re. ram, in the old days, when 64mg was typical, efficient systems were more important. Again, with the old Compaq (boy, I learned a lot with that computer), which came with 64mg and win98, I remember adding 64mg of ram for a total of 128. There was no huge speed increase, but did the system ever run smoother, with less swapping to the pagefile. And nowadays, 512 is a minimum with 1gig typical, and it really takes the pressure off the swapfiles, at least in day-to-day operations.

Nevertheless, I went ahead tonight (just a few minutes ago, actually) and partitioned that 98se drive into 3 partitions: a 6g os + program partition, a 1g swapfile partition, and a 72g storage partition. I'll play with it for a few days and see what differences I notice, but I suspect very few other than those you referred to such as defragging and such. I just got done running the sisoft sandra (newest version) file system test, and there was absolutely no difference (that wd80 se gets a score of 50, which is pretty awesome). Sandra is a nice general performance metric, but perhaps it does not reflect daily use. I'll see.

At the very least, making the os partition smaller should make the process of creating an image of that partition easier. As for the storage partition, well, I don't plan on storing any crucial files on it. This is just an experiment. I happened to have the drive available and so I'm using it, for otherwise it's too large, overkill really. But then again, nowadays try finding a really good hdd much smaller than that with 8mg cache. Plus, I'm having fun running 98se on this drive. That's the bottom line. And it runs my son's games incredibly well.

Gotodreams, so as to not go too far afield here and in the interest of your original thread, I'll post back in a few days and let you know what differences I notice with the drive partitioned.

Good night Gracie.

marty

please look into this thread too

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=37067