Win 95 and Hard drives

[peven99]

I have a second computer with Win 95. The computer came with a 4G hard disk. I was running out of space, so I wanted to replace the HD with a bigger one. I am having difficulty with the PC recognizing a 100G HD.

I saw somewhere that Win 95 does not work with HD bigger than 32G. Is that true?

[Murray S.]

Howdy and welcome to CTH:

If you are running Win95a, you are going to have a hard time getting 95 to recognize anything over 8GB..

100GB on that system is out of the question unless you want to make about 13 x 8GB partitions!!

Murray

[Idnew]

The maximum physical disk size is going to be dictated by the hardware you
are using. This is a combination of the controller and the BIOS. AFAIK
Windows 95 will not work with a 48-bit controller, but I assume this is
because the manufacturers do not provide W95 drivers for their devices.

Within this constraint, any other limitation is actually in the file system,
not the operating system. Windows 95 uses the FAT file system, but version
B and later can also use the FAT32 file system, so it depends on the version
you are running.

What Windows can use within a large disk depends on how you define it. For
instance, the original FDISK can't cope with a disk larger than 64Gb, but
it's easy to get third party partitioning tools with no such limitations.

The maximum partition size and the maximum number of partitions is the
ultimate limit, so start here and follow the links for a description of
where the various limitations come from:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=118335

Windows 95a and older can only support FAT format which maximizes at 2Gb.
Windows 95B and C can use FAT32 and will support the bigger drives

Hard Drive Size (http://www.spcug.org/reviews/bl0107.htm)

If properly configured," Windows 95 can handle drives with a single partition as large as 2 terrabytes.!!!! It will also handle 2 terrabytes of RAM.


To get an idea of the capacity of a terabyte, consider the common megabyte (MB). One thousand megabytes equals one gigabyte, but one million megabytes equals a terabyte!

1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte

1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte

1,024,000 megabytes = 1 terabyte

[jtdoom]

hi
there are some half truths in that txt idnew pasted

fdisk issue just needs an update (fdisk from a millenium disk is a good replacement) for it would handle over 64 giga correctly when one uses percentages tather than believe the numbers presented on screen, for it indeed has a cosmetic issue.

95 with fat32 cannot handle over 32 gigabyte partitions very well.
its own tools fail when they reach that capacity
scandisk is a serious issue here... so one better stays under 32 giga partitions
(actually, same goes for windows98)

so now what?
the drive manufactor should have a download available (recently, I saw that toshiba no longer offered this for the reason that "everybody" uses XP and they don't need no diskmanager.... w/i Bull.)
with that download, one makes a drive manager CD or floppy, and then one uses this to install the drive.
Mind you, if the OS is TOO old, you are out of luck, for that drive manager will probably insist that you use at least fat32.

anyway, it appears you got somewhere already, and my advice is to stay under 32 giga per part.