Since your message arrived to my private e-mail adress and i suppose your intention was to send it to the piclist i am forwarding it ... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: 95/NT dual boot problem Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 12:18:30 +1100 From: "Brandon, Tom" To: ranguelo@informatik.hu-berlin.de According to Microsoft, the NT Boot loader uses INT13H extensions which take only a 24bit address. 8 bits are used for the side (head), 10 bits for the cylinder and 6 for the sector. This allows 256 sides, 1024 cylinders and 63 sectors (start at 1 not 0). With NTFS's default 512byte sectors this is 8.4Gb (well 7.8Gb, 8.4 Billion bytes). But as you mention it formats the system partition FAT first which has a limit of 4Gb (min. = 1K sectors I guess that means) so a single partition 7.8Gb disk is not possible. BTW: Partition Magic is a great program for getting around the FAT16 limitation. Install on a 4Gb partition and then resize it as much as you want with PQMagic. FAT32 For Windows NT4.0 is made by SysInternals (www.sysinternals.com). This same company also have 2 other similarly useful products for such a situation: NTFSDOS provides NTFS support in DOS (and 95 via vxd) and NTFS For Windows 98 (works on 95 as well). The NTFS for 9x is a very interesting product as rather than writing a NTFS driver for 9x they wrote a driver allowing the NTFS.sys driver from NT to run under 9x. Hence the same product can be used with the Win2K NTFS5 driver to provide NTFS5 support. All their products are available in free, readonly versions. Full versions are about US$49 each. Tom. -----Original Message----- From: Stefan Ranguelov [mailto:ranguelo@GMX.NET] Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2000 11:44 AM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: 95/NT dual boot problem Hi Folks. Brian Kraut wrote: > > > I have been trying for a week on a 13G Maxtor and a 15G Western Digital > drive to set them up as 95/NT dual boot machines. When I do it on a > 3.5G drive everthing works fine. I have done this a month ago with my new 20 GB disk. It took me two weeks (!) to find out how, but now it works! There are some very nasty limitations of the NT installing and boot process. I ended up with this configuration: - Boot from a small primary FAT16 paritition (C:) where the NT boot-manager can reside. My is 100 MB, less will work also. It must be at the beginning of the hard disk and be inside the first 256 cylinders (!) - Rest - one big NTFS or FAT32 paritition or what ever you like ... There is a driver aviable enabling Windows NT acsess FAT32 filesystems. The read-only version of it is free. So if you like to acsess the big data paritition from both Win9x and NT, choose FAT32. If you want to prevent Win9x from acsessing it, use NTFS. This is the short form of my recomendation. Here are some more explanations. There are several limitations of Windows NT. - The Install procedure uses old ATAPI/IDE drivers and can not recogize big hard disk properly. On a running system the problem is solved with the Service Packs, they are not aviable at install time ... - The install procedure first formats FAT16 and copies the files on it and then converts it to NTFS. So the NT install paritition has all limitations of FAT16. Hope, all this helps you... Stefan.