PCbanter - View Single Post - Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

**Paul** · March 13th 14, 05:57 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

wrote:
On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:12:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
That sure is complicated !!!!

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD. They're
cheap these days. I dont see the need for anything bigger. I have darn
near filled up the 160G (2 drives) on my W98 machine, but that's because
I store everything on it. I have around 5000 songs, at least 1000
videos, everything I've downloaded since the early 90's and saved, and
many years of photos. I just recently bought a 500g and a 1tb USB
external drives, and all that stuff is going to get moved to them. I
really dont see the need for more than 160g, as long as I dont store all
that stuff on it. I'll probably keep the music on the HD though,
because those USB drives cant be accessed from W98, so I'd have to keep
booting to W2K to listen to the songs. -OR- use the XP computer, which
means I need two sets of speakers, which is already getting too
cluttered with 2 systems.

I probably will make that bigger drive into 4 partitions anyhow. Having
one huge drive tends to get very fragmented. I have one 5g partition on
my W98, just for my newsreader. Because I save lots of messages, that
tends to get more fragmented than anything else on the computer. But
that tiny partition can be defragegd in 2 or 3 minutes.

Anyhow, I'll save that 160g drive for the next computer I make, which
will be a newer processor and MB.

Thanks

Wow, somehow I screwed up the subject line on this msg....

No you didn't. Your response seems perfectly reasonable :-)

I wouldn't worry about this too much.

If you're concerned about an internal (IDE) drive,
and one partition is present, keep it below 137GB.
If two partitions are present, make sure the second partition
does not span the 137GB mark. For example, if you had
0-136GB as one partition, and 138GB-160GB, that should
be pretty safe. The upper partition won't be touched,
if it is considered "out of reach".

Installing a PCI card with an IDE connector, one purchased
today, would give 48 bit LBA on the motherboard side. Installing
the OS, gives an opportunity to detect trouble (as C: won't go past
137GB, if the Service Pack is too old). Copying over a 40GB WinXP
install to a 160GB empty disk, then booting the 160GB, wouldn't
give quite the same degree of protection against issues. You could
get in there, and notice Disk Management won't allow creation of
partitions above 137GB, which would tell you something about which
OS release you used.

The external drives can extend to 2.2TB, as they aren't passing
through a motherboard-style IDE interface. And if you buy a
3TB or 4TB drive, be prepared for another long answering post :-)

Paul