FYI, the cloned drive with file system grown out by Gparted does not boot. Just sits at a black screen with a blinking cursor, no disk access at all. 😒

Not sure but I want to know what you're doing with Windows ME that fills up 16GB. ISOs?

Think I remember hearing that newer vers of gparted have issues with 9x FAT16/FAT32 but haven't tested in awhile.

DosFreak wrote:

Not sure but I want to know what you're doing with Windows ME that fills up 16GB. ISOs?

Think I remember hearing that newer vers of gparted have issues with 9x FAT16/FAT32 but haven't tested in awhile.

Ha! I haven't filled it, it's only got about 6GB used so far. I do have a few GOG games that I got working on there that take up a ton of space because of nocd (Undying, UT, Unreal, RtCW and a few others each take up 500MB minimum). And another game that I installed from the original CD then applied a nocd patch (NFS: High Stakes).

I'm just trying to figure out how WinME decided on 16GB, I don't remember it prompting me during format and install.

clueless1 wrote:

FYI, the cloned drive with file system grown out by Gparted does not boot. Just sits at a black screen with a blinking cursor, no disk access at all. 😒

The drive may have been cloned but the partition may not be active.

1fdisk /mbr

may do the trick. If you have a bootable WinME diskette, boot from it and then run fdisk.exe on that hard drive itself. Or you could mount that drive in a modern "NT" system (7, 8, or 10) and use diskpart to select the partition and set it active.

clueless1 wrote:

I'm just trying to figure out how WinME decided on 16GB, I don't remember it prompting me during format and install.

16GB is a weird limit; it almost would have had to ask, but I'm not sure why it would suggest 16GB. I know XP doesn't like creating a larger-than-32GB partition, but there's no obvious reason to limit it to 16GB on a WinME install, because FAT32 allows rather large sizes. If it'd tried to create a FAT16 partition, it'd have stuck with 2GB for full compatibility.

@AlaricD - thanks for the ideas. I'm pretty sure fdisk /mbr won't work but I'll try it anyway. The reason, I had a similar issue on 98SE where I tried to clone an install to a larger drive. If I left the extra space unallocated, the drive would boot normally. But if I tried to expand the partition to fill the larger drive's additional space, I'd get the blinking cursor thingy, and fdisk /mbr wouldn't help. I think something like Partition Magic would work fine, there's something about gparted clonezilla and Win98/ME FAT32 that don't like each other. I just haven't been motivated to spend money on an old copy of PM.

edited to strike gparted and replace with clonezilla in 2nd to last sentence

clueless1 wrote:

If I left the extra space unallocated, the drive would boot normally. But if I tried to expand the partition to fill the larger drive's additional space, I'd get the blinking cursor thingy, and fdisk /mbr wouldn't help.

Can you expand it to 63GiB? At 64GiB it changes the cluster size (chkdsk will tell you the cluster size). It may be that it's resizing and not changing the cluster size appropriately, or that it IS changing the cluster size. But if you can still boot to a floppy and view all the files (and run chkdsk and fdisk and even re-SYS the drive) then it seems it should be resizing it correctly.

Did you use the WinME Fdisk to create the partition? It has a bug with partitions bigger than 64GB and it will substract 64GB from that and only recognize the hard drive size as 80GB-64GB=16GB. To avoid that, you have to enter the partition size in percent (so entering 100% will create a 80GB partition) or don't use the FDISK Version that comes with Win9x.

MIcrosoft also offers a patch for FDISK:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=263044

Interesting, I was aware of the fdisk patch for Win98, I thought it was all fixed by the time ME was released. Honestly, I don't remember fdisk coming up during the ME install. It just formatted and installed entirely from the installation disc (no floppy required). But this subtracting 64GB bug does sound like exactly what's going on. Thanks. Now I have to reinstall from scratch again if I want to use the full size of my hdd. 😵

Voset wrote:

Did you use the WinME Fdisk to create the partition? It has a bug with partitions bigger than 64GB and it will substract 64GB from that and only recognize the hard drive size as 80GB-64GB=16GB. To avoid that, you have to enter the partition size in percent (so entering 100% will create a 80GB partition)

Just tested this on a spare 80GB drive and it works. Boot up with the ME floppy. Run fdisk manually. Say NO to the first question about wanting to use the maximum size of the drive and make the partition active. Then when it asks you how much space you want to allocate, erase the default max size in GB and replace it with '100%'. Then manually make the partition active. Now you can boot the ME CD, it will format the drive and install the OS. When I got to the desktop, the C: drive was the full 80GB. Thanks for the tip!

gparted since 0.9.0 removed support for FAT16 and FAT32!
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/46 … FAT16-and-FAt32

Jo22 wrote:

gparted since 0.9.0 removed support for FAT16 and FAT32!
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/46 … FAT16-and-FAt32

Wow, I had no idea! Thanks! FYI, in case anyone else wants to try, here's the last 0.8.x version:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/file … stable/0.8.1-3/
Going to test this out today and if it works, will keep a copy around for Win9x/ME purposes.

Voset wrote:

Did you use the WinME Fdisk to create the partition? It has a bug with partitions bigger than 64GB

That is good to know! Good sleuthing (or good memory, if you've experienced the problem before and that's why you know).

Just following up to report that gparted 0.8.1-3 worked perfectly. I started with my original 80GB drive that was reporting only a 16GB partition. I used gparted first to grow the file system to fill the partition, then to shrink the partition from 80GB to 60GB. Did both operations at once and had absolutely no issues. Plugged the drive in, it booted to the desktop, and saw that the partition size was 60GB. 😎