I used to be more up to speed with PC's, but being in a different profession for the last few years has left a few doubts. I am building a new PC, which I have researched pretty heavily. Just building this PC has made me get up to speed with some stuff, but let me get to my question. I plan on putting somewhere in the range of a 40 - 60GB drive in my PC. In years past I formatted my drives into three sections, one primary and one extended divided into two logicals. I did this so I could have one partition for my OS and program files, one for data and the next for the windows swap file. That always seemed to be a pretty good setup for me. My question is this, what would be a feasible distribution for these drives on a HD the size I plan on using? I plan to use 256MB or DDR initially, but will most likely have at least 512MB at some point. I am probably going to install Win98SE initially since I have a copy sitting around. Recommendations or Questions?
I'm not totally sure, but you may find that hard drives of that size may be a problem with FDISK. However, they've been including utilities to partition and format the hard drive with, if you buy the retail version. 2nd. 512MB is the maximum any Win9x OS can use (95,98, 98SE,ME) and you may have trouble getting it to work stably with that amount of RAM. 256 is about the maximum you can really install before the returns start diminishing. If you still plan on having 512MB or larger amounts of RAM, I highly suggest using Windows 2000 or Windows XP, since they are newer and MS is still going to be supporting them for a few years. 98 isn't like this, and I belive the support for it has been discontinued. Also, some newer hardware requires Windows 98SE as the minimum anymore. You can still use 98, but it would be in your best intrest to move up, especially to make the most of that new system (which I imagine you'll be going for something fairly high-end).
I haven't found anything about boundaries for fdisk, but I did find a few things about volume size and FAT32 file system. FAT32 will accept volume sizes from 512MB to 2 TB's, which is quite a spread. I did find that XP does not like volume sizes over 35MB though, but nothing on Win98SE as of yet. I plan on going to XP eventually, but 98SE is what I will bring the system together with so I am keeping XP requirements in mind. I appreciate the input.
