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Old November 15th 07, 03:53 PM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,microsoft.public.win98.disks.general,microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Default 250 GB drives - please help

MEB wrote:

It may be time [or rather past time] to think about using the
hard drive manufacturer tools rather than MS fdisk and format
for ANY drive manipulation.


As I've posted in the past, I favor the use of manufacturer-provided
tools because they usually allow a drive to be FAT-32 formatted with
non-standard cluster sizes. But for most people it's not necessary -
FDISK and Format will suffice.

The manufacturers newest tools all now have NTFS abilities built-in
[some more than others - of particular interest to dual booters],


I think there's a good case to be made to install Win-2k or XP on a
drive formatted as FAT-32 as opposed to NTFS. Even if the system is
not dual-boot. The advantages of NTFS are largely lost on most
single-user or SOHO users. It is easier (and cheaper) to diagnose,
fix, detect and remove malware on a FAT-32 drive than it is for NTFS.
The reliability and performance of FAT-32 is highly under-rated. And
if the system is dual-boot, then both OS's have access to all files on
all volumes.

Want to use larger drives?
Then consider: a newer mother board [or a used board that supports
larger drives];


For those that may not know, any motherboard that has a Pentium-4 or
Celeron CPU (technically, socket 478 or newer) will have the necessary
support for large hard drives, and in some (many?) cases a BIOS update
is available for motherboards with Pentium 3 CPU's.