>>Maxtor jumpers, PM, etc.
The other jumper for Maxtors is a cylinder-limiting jumper
which will make the drive itself report that it is physically
smaller than it is, so OSs that can't handle large drives
can use it. But the rest of the drive is unavailable.
This doesn't work for me; besides NT can handle it if
you get it far enough.
NT can't handle drives bigger than 8.4 gig without the
ATA fix or service pack 4. However, it should have no
trouble with partitions smaller than that in the front
end of a larger drive. I have accessed partitions of
16gb from NT with SP1 only. Disk manager reports an
8.4 gb drive with a 16 gb partition on it <g>.
I formatted the partition with another NT machine
that has the ATAFix installed on SP3.
I have not succeeded in getting NT to boot from a partition
larger than 8.4gb, even a cloned NT with SP4 installed
that will boot from a smaller partition. I was also
careful to clone the boot files from the SP4 install
(ntldr, ntdetect).
I have booted NT from a 4.5gb partition for years with
no problems, but not from a larger one. Possibly
if NTOSKRNL.exe migrates above the 2k boundary there's
a problem, or something. However, that wasn't the
problem with booting a partition larger than 8.4 gb,
as the partition was nearly empty.
The NT documentation is contradictory. In some places
it says the NT system partition can't be larger than
2gb; in another place it says NT can handle up to 8.4 gb during
the boot; in another place it says NT can handle partitions
larger than 8.4 without reference to booting one way or the
other. This is pre-ATAFIX/SP4 documentation.
Dave says he was able to grow his NT partition to greater
than 8.4 after installing at under that (where NT
resides, not necessarily the actual primary bootable).
I would assume he was able to boot it.
I have not, as is probably known, been a big PM fan, and
my experience installing the 4.0 upgrade this morning confirms my
previous feeling. Yes, no clue as to what 4.01 does
that I could find either. I'm going to look again,
but I seem to remember from somewhere, probably here,
that it's a big disk update <g>. |
