Win98 supports 120gb partitions.

FAT32's max partition size is 2TB with 512-byte sectors. If you format your drive with 4K sectors, then the max partition size balloons to 16TB (or there about)
max file size is still 4GB.

I've often slapped a 320GB hard drive on pentium-class computers. But I always used a nice sata card that had an on-board bios that allowed for large drive support.

32GB was just an artificial limit imposed by WinXP because MS wanted you to use NTFS.
Win98 and ME (and maybe 2000...can't remember) were always able to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB.

Thanks. I had no idea

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-11-20, 01:29:

32GB was just an artificial limit imposed by WinXP because MS wanted you to use NTFS.

The official excuse is that FAT32 starts to become slow and inefficient with larger partitions, e.g. because of larger cluster sizes.

"Official" specs are here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-ver … rectedfrom=MSDN , https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/1403 … s-fat-and-exfat
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/con … le-systems.aspx

Max number of clusters : 4,177,918 (this one seems well defined)
Max cluster size : 32KB or maybe more (hard to have an official max number, do not go over for Windows 9x )

FAT32's max partition size is 2TB with 512-byte sectors.

It's LBA48 limitation with Master Boot Record (which is 32-bit), both for FAT and NTFS.

If you format your drive with 4K sectors

AFAIK it won't help. You need both physical (Advanced Format without 512-bytes emulation) and logical 4K sectors to get full access with MBR.

Win98 supports 120gb partitions.

Actually 137.4 GB. This limitation is also present on NT 4.0, pre-SP3 Win2k and vanilla Windows XP. It's limitation of LBA32.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-11-20, 02:12:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-11-20, 01:29:

32GB was just an artificial limit imposed by WinXP because MS wanted you to use NTFS.

The official excuse is that FAT32 starts to become slow and inefficient with larger partitions, e.g. because of larger cluster sizes.

Yeah XP can work with bigger than 32GB FAT32 partitions but it will not allow you to install to one unless you do some work arounds. MS did that to promote NTFS afaik....