98SE Not enough mem to scan or defrag hd

Could not install 98se on a 13, or a60g HD, both being re fdisked and
formatted. Then tried win98se, and winxp pro os systems, none worked. Just
went out and got a 160g that I'll shortly add to another comp. Did all the
required prep including BIOS adjustment to the new HD which meant changing
from AUTO to LBA. Although it is to big for the MB (not 48bit) it still
shows up at 137g. All was ok when I put on 98se, but I try to scan disk or
defrag and I keep getting prompts that it can't do those functions due to not
having enough memory!!! First it had 256mb, then I put in 256 more for 512,
still same prompt. I have never seen an instance of this, especially in98se
OS which I have transfered and reinstalled at least of couple dozen times
over the years on my six machines as I am continually upgrading my mb and
hd's, and then the oldest machine goes to another of my kids. How can I not
have enough mem? It is a 4 mon. old U Guru ABIT board with a Navidia chipset
and a 1.8mb proc. This is no low end MB, plus it is using a 64mb ATI
Radeon All In One videocard. Am starting to wonder about the board. KEYS

The message probably means that the partitioning is incorrect.

See, for instance:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q229154/
"Your Computer Does Not Have Enough Free Memory to Defrag the Drive" Error
Message

You can see the number of clusters (or "Allocation Units") by running CHKDSK
from a DOS prompt.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Keyboards53" wrote in message
...
Could not install 98se on a 13, or a60g HD, both being re fdisked and
formatted. Then tried win98se, and winxp pro os systems, none worked.
Just
went out and got a 160g that I'll shortly add to another comp. Did all
the
required prep including BIOS adjustment to the new HD which meant changing
from AUTO to LBA. Although it is to big for the MB (not 48bit) it still
shows up at 137g. All was ok when I put on 98se, but I try to scan disk
or
defrag and I keep getting prompts that it can't do those functions due to
not
having enough memory!!! First it had 256mb, then I put in 256 more for
512,
still same prompt. I have never seen an instance of this, especially
in98se
OS which I have transfered and reinstalled at least of couple dozen times
over the years on my six machines as I am continually upgrading my mb and
hd's, and then the oldest machine goes to another of my kids. How can I
not
have enough mem? It is a 4 mon. old U Guru ABIT board with a Navidia
chipset
and a 1.8mb proc. This is no low end MB, plus it is using a 64mb ATI
Radeon All In One videocard. Am starting to wonder about the board. KEYS

"Keyboards53" wrote:

Could not install 98se on a 13, or a60g HD, both being re fdisked and
formatted. Then tried win98se, and winxp pro os systems, none worked. Just
went out and got a 160g that I'll shortly add to another comp. Did all the
required prep including BIOS adjustment to the new HD which meant changing
from AUTO to LBA. Although it is to big for the MB (not 48bit) it still
shows up at 137g. All was ok when I put on 98se, but I try to scan disk or
defrag and I keep getting prompts that it can't do those functions due to not
having enough memory!!! First it had 256mb, then I put in 256 more for 512,
still same prompt. I have never seen an instance of this, especially in98se
OS which I have transfered and reinstalled at least of couple dozen times
over the years on my six machines as I am continually upgrading my mb and
hd's, and then the oldest machine goes to another of my kids. How can I not
have enough mem? It is a 4 mon. old U Guru ABIT board with a Navidia chipset
and a 1.8mb proc. This is no low end MB, plus it is using a 64mb ATI
Radeon All In One videocard. Am starting to wonder about the board. KEYS

The problem is with the total number of clusters (allocation units) on
the 160 gb hard drive, as Jeff Richards said.

Scandisk and Defrag cannot operate on drives with more than 4.1
million (2 ^ 22) total clusters.

Your 160 gb drive should be OK if you are using it as a 137 billion
byte (= 128 binary gigabytes) provided the drive is using a 32K
cluster size, which is the maximum supported on FAT32.

However if you used a disk cloning utility to transfer the contents
from an older smaller hard drive to the new one then there is a
possibility that the new drive ended up with an 8K or 16K cluster
size, resulting in too many clusters for Scandisk and Defrag to cope
with.

If that is the case, and CHKDSK will tell you if it is when it reports
the total allocation units on the drive and the number of bytes in
each allocation unit then you can fix the problem without too much
difficulty. All you need to do is to use a disk partioning utility
such as Partition Magic (Symantec) or BootItNG (www.bootng.com) to
change the cluster size of the existing partition to 32K which will
reduce the total number of clusters thereby allowing Scandisk and
Defrag to operate properly.

Note that changing the cluster size will probably require a
considerable amount of processing time during which you cannot turn
off the computer or use it for any other tasks or functions. And
because any change to the hard drive data structure does involve some
degree of risk you should ensure that you bave backups of any and all
valuable data before you attempt it.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm