Stuart Miller wrote:

Thank you for that info. You are bypassing some of the windows
disk management routines, so it would be natural to expect
better results and fewer limitations.

Actually, in some of my previous posts, I've detailed how the
conventional win-98 versions of fdisk and format.com (the "updated"
format.com) are capable of preparing a 250 gb drive with fat-32.
Granted, you can't specify the cluster size with format, but still
those 2 programs work on drives up to at least 250 gb.

I don't remember the specific limits, but I recall 1 gig hard
drives were a problem in dos.

Over the years, there have been a number of file system limitations as
fat went from fat to fat-16 to fat-32, and as motherboard bios
parameters have changed to reflect increasing drive capacity.

It's not really correct to pin the limitation on DOS when the
file-system specifications are the issue.

As it stands, the "DOS" that comes with win-98 is fully compatible
with any hard drive you can hang off a given motherboard because DOS
uses system bios calls (enhanced int13). When it comes to IDE (PATA)
drives, win-98 is handicapped by it's protected-mode driver
(ESDI_506.pdr) which limits it to drives no larger than 128 gb.

Question - what does this do with the 2gig/4gig file size
limit? I use both numbers, because fat-32 can not create
a file bigger than 4 gigs, but it can not copy files
between 2 and 4 gigs.

Last year I built a win-XP system for a relative. I loaded it with
all sorts of multi-media, video-editing software. The hard drive was
a 250 gb SATA. And I prepared it with the previously-mentioned WD
software, as a single FAT-32 volume with 4kb cluster size. What I
found is that video-capture software seemlessly spanned the 4 gb
file-size limitation by breaking up the files. I personally prefer
FAT32 over NTFS for a number of reasons, but that argument is for
another thread.

Actually, I think that FAT and FAT-16 had a limit of
something like 512 entries in the root directory

This is a ms-dos restriction, and applies to all fat-12
and fat-16 systems.

Again, I see that as a limitation or shortcoming of the fat-16 spec -
not of DOS.

ms-dos (which is win 95 & 98) would not create any more
entries after a specific number.

Technically, I think that win-98 FE (first edition) came with FAT-32
capability.

Comparisons of the written files only proves that both were
written correctly. I am concerned about the ability to
randomly update files past the usual limits. Maybe 'randomly
update' is a poor choice of words, as files are not updated
in place - a new file is written, then the old one
'erased'. But I am sure you understand what I mean
here.

So basically the task is to write a program that can open a file for
random access and start performing reads and writes to it. The file
would not "move around" the drive in this case, but presumably would
occupy the same physical/logical sectors. Or alternatively, I could
create a text file, close it and open it and edit it, and keep
repeating the process.

hmmm put the windows registry or swap file way back
there and see what happens.

I'm going to have to check something with that system - it seems to
not be using virtual memory according to the performance tab in
System Properties.

-----------

Just a bit of an update regarding DOS scandisk and my 500 gb drive.

After approx. 24 hours, scandisk is still operating on the drive.

Within the first few minutes (perhaps the first 15 - 30 minutes) it
checked the Media Descriptor and the File Allocation Tables. What has
taken the majority of time so far is the check of the Directory
Structure. It is currently at the 24% point of that check.

I'll let it go over night and see where it's at in the morning.