Win 95 & Segmented HDD

[Guest]

I would like Win95 to recognize my HDD as one drive and not have it segmented into 2GB formats.

How do I go abouts making it so?

Thank you for your time.

 

[Arrow]

I think many hard drive manufacturers provide a utility for this. You can probably find it off their site.

Rob
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[dmcmahon]

Are you willing to reformat your hard drive and reinstall stuff? If so, then create a DOS boot disk with FORMAT and FDISK, plus any software needed to read your CD-ROM drive, e.g. MSCDEX or whatever (test-boot it to make sure!). Boot this and use FDISK to delete all the current partitions, then create one big one.

Note: you must have Win95 OSR2, with FAT32 support. You say yes when FDISK starts up and asks if you want to enable large hard disk support. If you don't have this version of Win95, you will never get the > 2G to work no matter what because it only understands FAT16 which has a 2G limit.

Utilities like Partition magic will allow you to make changes without re-installing, though I've found that sometimes they screw up and the result won't boot anymore, and they're also slow enough that I usually find it better to do a clean re-install. With Partition magic, you would
convert the base partition to FAT32 from FAT16, then increase it's size (after deleting the other partitions).
This assumes you have someplace to copy all your stuff that's on the other partitions, of course.

If you have a spare hard drive then it's possible to avoid the need to reinstall all your apps. Format the spare and be sure to transfer the system to it with SYS so it will be bootable. In your BIOS, make the spare drive the primary boot disk and make sure you can boot into it (it will come up in DOS). Again, make the boot floppy as before, only this time do the windows re-install to the spare drive. Once windows is running, create a "Save" folder on the spare drive and then copy all the folders (e.g. "Program Files", "My whatever", "WINDOWS", etc.) to this area. Be sure to also copy all the hidden files that are at the root of the disk, e.g. IO.SYS, PAGEFILE.SYS, etc. Then you can use FDISK under windows against the orginal drive, blow away the partitions, create one big FAT32 partition, reformat the drive (again, use SYS to transfer the boot image). Now you should be able to copy the "image" of the original drive back into place, e.g. \WINDOWS, "Program Files", etc. Finally, you go back to the BIOS, switch the primary boot device back to the original drive, and it should boot up just like before, since all the higher-level software was untouched.

Obviously you should make a backup of your stuff before trying any of this, especially if you are going to use a lower-level utility like Partition Magic to restructure your partitions. Good luck!