Clarification

[jwilder]

Along the path of my learning about networking, etc. I was once instructed that WINNT does not properly utilize a primary partition any bigger than approximately 4G. Therefore, whenever I've setup an NT machine, I've typically set the primary partition size to 4G (4095) and then proceed, creating the remainder of the harddrive(s) as additional 'drives' in NT.

Anyone else heard of this or have comment to it? Jason Wilder
IT/CAD Manager

 

[butchrecon]

When you are installing Windows NT 4.0, you can create a system partition with a maximum size of 4 GB. This occurs because Setup first formats the partition using the FAT file system. If you want to use an NTFS partition, the partition is converted to NTFS after the first reboot. The FAT file system has a file system limitation (unrelated to any BIOS limitations) of 4 GB. When you perform an unattended installation, use of the ExtendOEMPartition directive in an Unattend.txt file can expand the system partition to a maximum of 7.8 GB.


Although Windows NT 4.0 can in theory support partitions of up to 16 exabytes in size using the NTFS file system, the maximum size of the system partition is limited to 7.8 gigabytes (GB).

Hope this helps you.