Windows 98 SCANDISK and DEFRAG limit

 
 

Windows 98SE has a default limitation of 128GB (137.4 billion Bytes) for ATA drives, because it only supports the ATA-5 28-bit LBA. Thus Windows 98 could theoretically use a 128GB partition, but a limitation of the Microsoft SCANDISK and DEFRAG programs reduces the practical size to 127.53GB (136.9 billion Bytes).

 
 

"The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB)."

Source: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - Q184006
 
 
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Page Content Updated: 1 September 2005