General question about older MB's and large drives

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

If the mother board does not detect the full size of a large Hard disk, this means FDISK cannot make a partition equal to the full size of the HD,
correct ???
I am Assuming there are no BIOS updates for the motherboard in question to handle very large drives.

However windows XP can access the HD bios direct so should see ALL the drive, so if I boot from the windows XP CD and use the NTFS file system and make the drive bootable will windows XP use all of the drive.

[ajzchips]

It should, but don't forget that Win98's FDISK is buggy... it'll display less than the drive's capacity if the HDD is over 64GB in size, but it'll FDISK properly (if and only if the HDD is supported by the BIOS).

ajzchips wrote:

It should, but don't forget that Win98's FDISK is buggy... it'll display less than the drive's capacity if the HDD is over 64GB in size, but it'll FDISK properly (if and only if the HDD is supported by the BIOS).

Thanks for reply

Would the winME FDISK handle more than 80GIG's

[Denniss]

Yep, ME Fdisk has no problem with drives above 64GB. Even the old Win98/Win98SE FDISK should be able to handle this but you have to enter partition sizes in percentage of total, not in MB (the capacity in MB is displayed wrong, partitioning with % works).

I don't now what happen with HDD capacity is over 64GB, but I'm sure that FDISK in Win98SE let you to create a 100% partition also if the HDD capacity in BIOS is less.
You need only to set correctly HDD parameters or set to AUTO.

[NickS]

Denniss wrote:

Yep, ME Fdisk has no problem with drives above 64GB. Even the old Win98/Win98SE FDISK should be able to handle this but you have to enter partition sizes in percentage of total, not in MB (the capacity in MB is displayed wrong, partitioning with % works).

Caution: ME Fdisk has trouble displaying correctly information on drives of 100GB or greater. The information is there but the screen formatting goes wrong and is difficult to read.

[edwin]

Is there a version of fdisk from the 95/98/Me era without any issues? beginning to wonder if we have finally found the end of usability for it...