Dealing with NT 4.0's Drive-Size Limitations

Win2K overcomes NT 4.0's drive-size limitation of 8GB on the system volume.

Bob Chronister

January 26, 2003

1 Min Read
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I've installed Windows NT 4.0 on a 60GB hard disk, but NT seems to find only 8GB. If NT has an 8GB limit, what's the workaround? I used NTFS, but that didn't work. Ultimately, I would like to install NT and Windows 98 Second Edition (Win98SE).

NT 4.0 has a drive-size limitation of roughly 8GB on the system volume (the volume that contains the initial NT 4.0 setup files—i.e., boot.ini, NT Loader—NTLDR, and ntdetect.com). The boot drive (the drive containing the %systemroot%system32 folder) doesn't have the same size limitation as the system drive, but the system drive's limitation makes what you want to do nearly impossible. You can't use FAT32 for the system volume because NT 4.0 can't read that file system, so you're limited to FAT16, which makes any drive space larger than 4GB almost inaccessible. I suggest using Windows 2000 instead of NT because it's written to the software interrupt 13 (INT 13) extensions and doesn't have INT 13 addressing's size limitations. Furthermore, Win2K can read the FAT32 file system. Win2K will solve most of your problems.

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