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Max disk size for Win98 SE ?

Thread needs solution

I have an old Win98 SE system that I use for archives and
I want to upgrade it to have a new larger hard drive.
In the past I have purchased and used True Image 8.0 and 9.0
with some difficulty on this system and this time I wanted to
see if Migrate Easy 7.0 would be the better choice since
I have my five logical drives and two partitions now laid out
the way I want. I just want more disk space now.
There was reference elsewhere in this forum from a search
that Win98 SE supported only a max of 127 or 137 mb but yet
in the Acronis pdf it states that Win98 fat 32 can support 2
terrabytes.
I think it is pretty lame to not have a separate forum for the
Migrate Easy product btw since you have a very capable forum
platform.
I'd like to get a drive of several hundred gigabytes but I dont
want to buy any bigger than the system will support without
a lot of trouble. For future operations simplicity, I dont want to
have to rely on any kind of exotic technque to support large
disk sizes. I want to know what size disk to purchase that can
be easily implemented without wasting much or any.
Thanks
Scott

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Hello Scott, welcome to our forum!

Let me clarify this situation you described:

Acronis Migrate Easy will work with all drives which correctly recognized by BIOS and your operating systems. It does support Windows 98 Second Edition also.

The cause is that Windows 98 does not support LBA-48 addressing mode, so it won't detect high capacity drives (>137 GB), even if you've installed all most recent updates. Furthermore, some old motherboards cannot recognize such drives too.

As it stated in our manual, the maximum size of HDD supported by FAT 32 filesystem is 2 TB. But this limitation is depended on filesystem only, while in our case limitations are caused by Windows 98.

In your situation I'd recommend you to get some 80-100 GB drive, or upgrade your OS to more recent version (Windows XP, for example).

Please let me know if you have any other questions concerning our products.

Thank you.

What isnt completely clear Alexander is whether the 137mb limitation may apply
to the maximum partition size instead of the max physical hard drive size.

Since I think the primary partition is separate from the extended partition in addressing,
it is conceivable to me that each partition might be a max of 137mb in the
Win98 systems that have the limitation of not supporting the LBA-48 stuff

Hello Scott,

Let me clarify this question too.

Yes, you're right here - max partition size is 137 GB's limited too. But if you dedicate separate drive more than 137 GB's in size, you won't be able to create several partition according to such limitation, since we have the limitation which applies to maximum hard disk size too (addressing rules apply to the whole HDD).

Thank you.

MEGA or GIGA

Yes, this is an old thread.

Still I wanted to point out something that seems to be missed altogether in this entire thread. The starting question mentions MEGAbytes, whereas the answer and some other posts mention GIGAbytes. Anyone referring to this thread for help will want to have this point clarified as to which is the appropriate size limit: 137 MEGAbytes or 137 GIGAbytes.

I don't know the definitive answer to this, but I'm very certain that I've used FAT32 drives with any partition type (main, extended, etc.) with at least 2 GIGAbytes.