Windows 98 Hard Drive Limitations?

[Appleboy45]

I have an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 that I use for older games and programs. I’ve been considering getting a secondary hard drive for it. My uncle said he has a bunch of old working IDE hard drives that he said I can use one of them. What I’m wondering is what are the hard drive /partition limitations/issues for Windows 98 knowing Windows 98 had limitations/issues with the drives. I’m not talking about motherboard issues right now, just the ones in Windows.

[ARikozuM]

I think it's 2,032GB (about 2TB), but I can't be sure if this is due to FAT32, MBR, or another cause.

 

Edit: 

 

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_maximum_partition_size_of_Windows_98

Quote

Windows 98 uses FAT32 partitions. A FAT32 partition has a maximum theoretical size of 8 TB, but with 512-byte sectors found on most hard drives, you cannot have a FAT32 partition of more than 2 TB.

Also, Windows 98 does not support LBA48 addressing by default, though there is a patch available. Without both this patch and a BIOS capable of LBA48 addressing (all BIOS from 2002 and later can), you cannot access ANY part of the hard drive, be it partitioned or not, beyond 127 GB. So the largest practical partition size for any Windows 98-era computer is a 127 GB partition on a 127 GB hard drive. Anything larger than that is unusable.

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

If you do choose to get multiple IDE drives, don't forget to configure them properly when connecting the ribbon cable and jumpers.

 

I personally would use the jumpers to configure both drives as "Cable Select" so whichever drive is plugged into the end of the cable will be the Master drive and the one that isn't will be the Slave drive.

[Appleboy45]

14 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I think it's 2,032GB (about 2TB), but I can't be sure if this is due to FAT32, MBR, or another cause.

 

Edit: 

 

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_maximum_partition_size_of_Windows_98

 

I remembered I had an old 200GB WD Caviar Hard Drive (From another computer). I wiped it and put it into my Dell. It does seem to detect the drive, though as the link says, it does seem to see only 137GB.

[Appleboy45]

12 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

If you do choose to get multiple IDE drives, don't forget to configure them properly when connecting the ribbon cable and jumpers.

 

I personally would use the jumpers to configure both drives as "Cable Select" so whichever drive is plugged into the end of the cable will be the Master drive and the one that isn't will be the Slave drive.

The original Maxtor Hard Drive was on Master (I couldn’t tell you if this was factory). I put it on cable select along with the test 200GB drive in there on cable select, and it works just fine.