Klaus Meinhard wrote:

quote
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).
unquote

I have been aware of that Micro**** KB article for several years, and
the information it contains is an absolute LIE.

I have myself created large fat32 partitions (larger than 127 gb, and in
some cases up to 700 gb) with up to 120 MILLION clusters and DOS
scandisk can process those FAT's with no trouble (but it can take many
hours, even 1 or 2 days of continuous processing if doing a surface
scan).

If booting directly into DOS to run scandisk, you must make sure that
himem.sys is in your config.sys, because contrary to what microsoft says
above, scandisk will use extended memory if it's available via
himem.sys. If it's not, scandisk will throw up a message advising you
to use himem.sys.

As long as your motherboard is LBA-48 aware (which means - if your
motherboard was made in 2002 or later) then DOS is fully compatible with
very large hard drives and volumes - far exceeding 128 gb in size.

Windows 98/me is not compatible with drives larger than 128 gb because
of it's protected mode driver (ESDI_506.PDR). But that only applies to
IDE drives. SATA drives don't have that limitation, so Win-9x/me
systems with SATA controllers and drivers can be used with very large
SATA hard drives (the largest I've tested was 750 gb).

DOS fdisk is compable with drives up to 512 gb (there are other fdisk
programs that can exceed that). DOS format.com is compatible with
volumes up to 1024 gb (1 tb) in size.