Windows 98 and NTFS? Or Windows 98 and handling 400 gb drive

[LuketehNerd46]

Hey guys, I have been around here for two years, but I have been wondering. Is there anyway for Windows 98 to either handle a NTFS drive or something along the lines of that? Or is there a way for Windows 98 to handle a 500 gb hard drive? If there is could anyone please let me know? That would be great to know. I am very experienced but I do not know that

[Resident007]

hmm... Interesting question. I think that Win98 is not capable of handling 500GB HDD, but it's just my mind

[user99672]

I implore you to use this wonderful technology called a "Search Engine".

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntfs+windows+98

Both commercial and freeware suggestions are listed in the top three hits. If you want native support, find a copy of the 98 SDK, and get coding.

[sdfox7]

You may also find this link interesting or useful:

48-bit LBA support on Win98se?

Also:

48-bit LBA and Windows 98, 98 SE, Me

[Windows OS]

FAT32 has a maximum volume limit of 12 TB using 4 KB sectors, but I'm pretty sure that Windows 98 could not read drives that big. About NTFS, there are utilities to support it on Win9x but I'm sure that you could not install and boot Windows on it. I think changes is needed at DOS kernel level to support NTFS for installation.

[Betaset]

Hi,
yes there are patches, so that windows 98 can support larger hard drives.

Several methods are described here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/107001- ... indows-9x/

But if you just want to use the large hard drive next to a smaller one with Windows installed, you can just get a cheap PCI Raid Contoller Card with Windows 98 drivers.
I don't know if you can boot to a hard drive connected to such a controller card, that's why I myself only use a large 1TB SATA drive as a second drive under Winodows 98.

But I heard there some programms which have problems with large partitions, so my FAT32 Partitions are smaller than 120GB.

[rloew]

I solved the 137GB limit over a decade ago.
You can use SCANDISK and DEFRAG from Windows ME.
I also solved the problem using SATA Drives and partitions larger than 1TiB.
I also have a set of Patches to work with Drives larger than 2TiB.
See:
http://rloew1.no-ip.com

[Betaset]

I can wholeheartedly recommend the patches by rloew. I had excellent experiences with his RAM-Patch, and the other patches are probably fine too.

[badmoon]

I think changes is needed at DOS kernel level to support NTFS for installation.

That's right. Because none of the Win9x OSes can use a separate boot partition, the DOS phase of the startup sequence needs to be able to read the necessary files—like the Windows kernel—from the system partition. Back then, it was assumed that everything would be FAT-formatted.

Still, there is software for reading and writing to NTFS volumes for both DOS and Windows 9x. It's an entirely different matter if it's possible to integrate those into the boot process, though—until NT4, the boot code was a hot mess!