Formatting a drive for Win98

Relative has a Win98 PC with a small drive. They don't need a bigger drive
but the one they have is failing.

I've got an 80G drive going spare that's unformatted and could format it on
my WinXP box with Fat32 but what about the size?

I'm sure the Bios and OS limit is going to be a problem. Is it possible to
format it as 6 or 8G drive or would that not work?

CWatters <colin.watters.TakeThisOut@turnersNOSPAMoak.plus.com> wrote:

> Relative has a Win98 PC with a small drive. They don't
> need a bigger drive but the one they have is failing.

> I've got an 80G drive going spare that's unformatted and could
> format it on my WinXP box with Fat32 but what about the size?

> I'm sure the Bios and OS limit is going to be a problem.

Why are you sure about that with the bios ?
Very unlikely indeed to be an OS problem.

> Is it possible to format it as 6 or 8G drive or would that not work?

Yes, but there arent all that many desktop systems which had
a problem at that level, quite a few more had a problem at 32G.
The 32G problem is obvious, the system wont boot if its got that
problem, it will hang at boot time. Easy to set the 32G jumper
thats on the absolute vast bulk of 80G drives to fix that.

If you do have a problem at 6 or 8G, the easiest way to get around
that is to short stroke the drive using Hitachi's Feature Tool. That
tells the drive to claim that its an 8G drive at boot time.

Its important to apply both fixes if they are needed before
partitioning and formatting the drive and safest to wipe the
drive with something like clearhdd first too.
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/clearhdd.htm