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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Len who wrote (1493)	6/23/1998 1:02:00 PM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Len, This is a confusing issue. Depending on who you talk to they will tell you NT has an 8gig limit on drives. I don't know if this is IDE only or what. Dell, Micron, and Gateway TS and sales were all saying this. Then gateway started shipping a 14.5 gig EIDE with an NT box. Their TS indicated that they got a special driver to hack around the problem. anyway the drive arrived partitioned in 7 FAt16 drives. I delete 6 of 7 drives and recreated a single 11.5 gig NTFS partition with no problems. I could not confirm or deny these statements anywhere in the MS knowledgebase. I don't know of anyone who has personally done this. moral, be careful, the thruth lies outthere but I can't tell you for sure if thats true or why? Seems rather illogical to me since 9.1 gig Drives have been used in servers for years.... Can anyone else add insight here.... Sean

To: Len who wrote (1493)	6/23/1998 5:49:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

Good question Len (on why Maxtor's 11.5 gig "requires" win 95. The answer, as Sean suggests in his follow-up, has to do with the 8.4 gig EIDE limit. Any > 8 gig IDE drive will thus be subject to these problems. There's both a bios and an OS issue here. -Bioses made before early this year can't "see" drive partitions beyond this limit without special enabling software (in Maxtor's case, "Maxblast," other vendors have their own solutions.) Some report this has worked well, but I would be wary messing with it--one more level of complexity. -DOS, AFAIK, normally cannot see beyond the 8.4 limit. I do know that partition magic, running under dos, sees it OK. -win95 can see beyond it. -NT can, provided one uses the fix described in my earlier post Message 4695015 . (Maxtor's web site contradicts this, saying NT can't use it, which would be true absent the fix.) For a more technical discussion of why, involving int13 extensions and other matters, consult any of the major hard drive vendors' web sites. Bottom line: if I had doubts about my bios and didn't need a bigger drive, I would opt for an EIDE drive under 8 gigs. But if the bios is good, and the fix is applied, the > 8 gig drives should be fine under NT.