Uechi-Ryu.com

Hello All.

FYI for those considering a Dual-Boot NT4.0/Win98 system with 'jumbo' drives: make sure you have lots of time for this venture.

Dual-booting of large hard drives may currently not be doable because of conflict resulting from the three file systems involved: fat16, fat32, and NTFS. NT doesn't recognize fat32 and in addition Win 98 doesn't recognize NTFS.

NT has difficulty with drives over about 9 or 10 gig (fixed with advanced Service Pack 3 (SP3) and its successor, SP4).

Win 98 didn't recognize fat16 set up by NT and NT didn't recognize the fat16 system set up by a number of methods. Cleaned OS issues by coercing a fat16 on the primary partition with still no success. There may be other tools out there such as the new partitioning software, but I have tried none of them.

I have a gut feel that NT5.0 will be as cantankerous as there is YAFS involved.

Install a dual-boot on a smaller hard drive may work with Win 98 as it does with Win 95, but it is not an option here and would only be an acedemic exercise. At this point situps would be a better exercise.

Allen

Tony, According to the folks at System Commander this product will work on jumbo drives -- Boot NT then their app and Voila. Thanx for the tip. -- Allen

I call it Hissing into the Wind, Anthony.

Commander doesn't work on NT 4.0 with Large drives. The cylinder count is not the real count of cylinders. According to the folks at V Communications, newer PCs do what's called disk imaging where they keep all sorts of disk info on hidden cylinders which mess-up the cylinder count -- and messes up their product.

The boot drive needs multiple primary partitions in order to load multiple OSes. This means scrubbing the disk (re-fdisking it) and reloading NT. Now, I just went through a sequence of painful experiences with NT 4.0 not being able to load onto Jumbo drives. This problem MAY be fixed in SP4, but You got to get an OS onto the drive before you can get SP4 on, etc. Solution is to have a small master drive, something under 10 gigs, but that isn't an option because about 30 gigs is a requirement. When I need more I will have to go SCSI unless there are bigger IDE drives then.

I know where this one is going in a handbasket real fast so getting one of these $500 CompUSA or Best Value pcs, complete with monitor and color printer, set up just for the internet and scanner networked with this PC is starting to look mighty attractive right about now.

Hmmm... I haven't done any Xmas shopping for the kids yet...

Allen

I gave up being impressed over computers. The more money you throw at them, the more time they steal from you.