At 17:25 4/28/99 -0700, Jim Gemeinhardt wrote:
>Could someone please give the maximum and minimum partition sizes
>for...various operating systems.

Hi Jim

The answer to your question is

Operating System and File System        Maximum Size

DOS, Win 3.1, Win95, Win95a FAT16...... 2 GB
Win95b, Win98 FAT32.................... 2 Terrabytes
WinNT FAT16............................ 4 GB
WinNT NTFS............................. 2 TB

1 GB (Gigabyte) = 1024 MB (Megabytes) and 1 TB (Terrabyte) = 1024 GB

WinNT will only let you create partitions up to 2 GB in size during
installation of the operating system since partitions are created
as FAT16 first and only converted to NTFS later in the installation.
You must create the larger partitions after NT is completely
installed. 4 GB FAT16 partitions are allowed in NT because NT will
allow 64KB clusters in FAT16...double the 32 KB limit of DOS and
Win9X. FAT32 partitions cannot be smaller than 512 MB and cannot be
compressed using DriveSpace or DriveSpace 3. Minimum partition
sizes for other FAT16 and NTFS are usually 1 cylinder (this depends
on individual drive geometry) which (for example) might be about
8 MB.

What the heck...here's some more information:

A better word for "partition" would be "volume" since a logical
drive inside an extended partition is not really itself a partition.

You can have a maximun of 4 partitions on a hard drive. These can
all be primary partitions or one can be an extended partition.
An extended partition is not bootable and itself can contain lots
of "logical drives" which look like partitions to the user. (I
forget how many logical drives can be inside an extended partition,
but you'll probably run out of drive letters before you get there.)
A disk drive does not *have* to have a primary (bootable) partition.

The FAT32 in Win98 is reportedly not completely the same as the
FAT32 in Win95b and the NTFS in WinNT5 (Windows 2000) will not
be completely the same as the NTFS used in WinNT4.

Regards,
Bill

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