computergeek92 wrote:

I read on wikipedia that there is corruption risk with drives over 32gb under windows 95.

Could you be more specific? I am not familiar with that reference. I wasn't aware there was anything inherently risky about large FAT32 partitions, just that they were generally a bad idea.

Well it seems Wikipedia took that line out of the page a while ago so I can't show you. I think it may be a Scandisk issue. I am also worried about using fat32 usb thumb drives over 32gb on win95/winxp dual boot pcs too.

Scandisk dose not like bigger drives in 9x

Jade Falcon wrote:

Scandisk dose not like bigger drives in 9x

How big?

I dual boot Win9x with NT4. The NT4 partition is 7.8 GB, the Win95c partition is 110 GB. Should I limit the Win95C partition size? What errors might I receive?

Before OSR2 Win95 didn't have FAT32 support, so was limited to 2 gig FAT16 partitions. OSR2+/98/98SE should all support 127.5 GiB (both the limit on 28-bit disk addressing and the largest FAT that fits inside Scandisk's and Defrag's 16 meg memory allocation). I see special warnings about OSR2 lacking support past 32 GB, but haven't investigated why.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base article confirms but doesn't enlighten much: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/246818

They reference a minor Scandisk bug that only 98/98SE received fixes for.

The changes required to support media larger than 32 GB in Windows 95 would require architectural changes that cannot be supported on these platforms.

Very interesting, but it certainly lacks detail. To me, this seems a lot like a marketing ploy to get the consumer to buy a new Microsoft operating system.

All Microsoft says for its description of the limit is "32 GB"; since I don't know the details behind this I don't know the exact number that the capacity limit represents. In the same knowledge base article where Microsoft says Windows 95 won't support drives over 32 GB, they say that Windows 98 (and presumbly, Windows ME) will support drives over 32 GB, but that a patch may be needed due to a bug in Scandisk on drives over 32 GB in size; see here. It may be that this Scandisk problem is the same as the one that caused Microsoft to write off large drives under Windows 95. Microsoft may have just decided it would not bother to patch Windows 95. Alternatively, they could be separate issues. Again, if you have any information on this subject, I'm all ears. :^)

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB30-c.html

Personally Ive installed Windows 95 on a 80 gig hard drive and the only thing wrong with it was scandisk , back in the day I use to run Norton Utilities (ver 3.0 IIRC ) anyway, and that came with a scandisk replacement that worked pretty good,but was a huge resources hog, not a problem by todays standards.

Edit: But to answer your question, I use to default it to 30gb for plop installs, no hassles what so ever.

Will copying over scandisk from 98SE fix the bug with scandisk-95?

I've actually installed Win95C on my Pentium Pro machine over this weekend on an 80GB drive. The installer detected my disk as 10GB and did not allow me to create proper partitions — only a single 10GB C partition. However, after the installation was finished and I've booted into the system the partition actually turned out to be 80GB. No issues so far, even after a couple of Scandisks (you can't install usbsupp without one), but I do plan to rearrange the partitions using a 3rd party tool.

Does anything bad happen with scandisk, or thereafter, if you shutdown the system during an operation, which encourages scandisk to run upon reboot? Is scandisk able to successfully "fix" the HDD's allocation tables, etc? Or does it remain corrupt?

The comments have made me concerned and am considering using Partition Magic to shrink my partition to 30 GB.

I'm not exactly clear on why one would choose Win95C over Win98 in the first place..?

FaSMaN wrote:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB30-c.html

That page links to http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/artic … s/Q243/4/50.ASP , like a lot of other sites, but unfortunately it seems that the original reference has been lost.

The only 32GB bug explicitly reported is that the GUI mode Scandisk in Win95 OSR2+ and unpatched 98/98SE can't do a full surface scan of >32GB IDE HDD's operating with Phoenix BitShift translation as opposed to the norm of LBA translation. That particular bug doesn't affect real-mode Scandisk, which is the one running automatically, nor 99% of users anyway because everyone uses LBA. That was reported here: https://support.microsoft.com/EN-US/kb/243450
There may be other bugs, at least MS wouldn't take responsibility for it.

firage wrote:

That was reported here: https://support.microsoft.com/EN-US/kb/243450

Ahh, that's the one. (Strange; a Google search for <ScanDisk Errors on IDE Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB> doesn't seem to find it.)

feipoa wrote:

Does anything bad happen with scandisk, or thereafter, if you shutdown the system during an operation, which encourages scandisk to run upon reboot? Is scandisk able to successfully "fix" the HDD's allocation tables, etc? Or does it remain corrupt?

The comments have made me concerned and am considering using Partition Magic to shrink my partition to 30 GB.

In my case — no, just the usual stuff (had to reset the frozen game, etc).

Jorpho wrote:

I'm not exactly clear on why one would choose Win95C over Win98 in the first place..?

Well, here are my reasons:

1) I'm using it for a Pentium Pro machine. Not many Windows games I'm going to play on it anyhow — not that Win95 should have a lot of compatibility issues. So I basically only need Windows for FAT32, proper AWE64 general MIDI emulation and installing games from official compilation disks like Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga that, like many other compilations, requires Win95 for installation. So, it's a bit of a "less is better" mentality;
2) I don't have any hardware that I would need Win98 for — no AGP, no USB (the USBSUPP I mentioned is needed by the Daemon Tools);
3) Win95 is supposed to be faster — and it really is, quite noticeably in case of my hardware. Shorter load times, for one;
4) Win95 is my first OS, actually, so there is the nostalgia factor, too;
5) My machine was released around 1996, so it's actually more period correct. I do realise that Pentium Pro were meant to be used with a WinNT, so it's not an entirely valid point.

I was also curious to see if Win95 is really that bad as they say. I can't say that it's any less stable than Win98 or that I'm missing any functionality.

No quick launch bar, minimize all icon, cool gradient title bars. 🤣

I liked OSR2 a lot, with 32MB of RAM it ran a little better than 98SE.

jheronimus wrote:

3) Win95 is supposed to be faster — and it really is, quite noticeably in case of my hardware. Shorter load times, for one;

I might expect Win95 without IE4 to be faster, but I wouldn't expect much difference for Win95C.

5) My machine was released around 1996, so it's actually more period correct. I do realise that Pentium Pro were meant to be used with a WinNT, so it's not an entirely valid point.

I had the impression that Win98 is optimized for i686 (including the Pentium Pro), and Windows 95 is not.