Ron Martell wrote:

The FAT32 implementation provides for 28 bits to be used for
cluster numbers, which means that it is possible to have up
to 268,435,445 total clusters on a drive.

Smaller limitations are the result of the tools (FDISK & Format
for example) normally used to create FAT32 drives.

There is little to no information regarding Win-98's compatibility or
operational stability with volumes with large cluster-counts, and just
what gets broken at what cluster-count.

The year-2000 update to fdisk does work for 250 gb drives (I haven't
tried it on a 500 gb drive). Format also works on 250 gb drives, but
because of it's use of 32kb cluster size there will be 7.6 million
clusters on a 250 gb drive.

I am not sure if the native win-98 versions of scandskw.exe,
dskmaint.dll and defrag.exe will operate on a volume that exceeds 4.17
million clusters but the win-me versions will, at least up to 31
million clusters. The windows ME versions did not function on a
volume with 121 million clusters, displaying an "insufficient memory"
message (even on a system with 1 gb memory).

The MS-DOS version of scandisk.exe does not seem to have a
cluster-count limitation and has been seen to run without issue even
on a 500 gb drive with 121 million clusters (although it was only
allowed to run for 30 hours before being terminated - it was projected
that it would have taken 3 more days to complete it's scan).

It has been speculated that the number of clusters is limited because
win-98 loads the entire FAT table into memory during normal
operational use, but given the recent test with a 121-million cluster
drive that theory appears to be wrong.

The only issue so far with win-98 installed on a 500 gb volume with
121 million clusters is that it will not create or place the swap file
on it, hence virtual memory will not be enabled. It will create /
place the swap file on a secondary drive, even if that drive is
another 500 gb drive (but formatted with 32kb cluster size resulting
in 15 million clusters).