hard drive & OS compatibility

I've got a new Western Digital hard drive. On the box it says it's designed for Win XP, Win 2000, Win ME, and Mac.
Does this mean it probably won't work for Windows 98?

The system requirements say: IDA-ATA interface (40-pin connector) and Ultra ATA-capable system.

Do hard drives generally work with any OS or do I need to find one made specially for Windows 98?

Normally they work with any OS - there might be issues with how large the OS "sees" the drive to be. Don't recall what, if any, limitations 98 had on that front. Older BIOS might also report an incorrect size to the OS...

/Michael

Methinks you're just limited by the size restrictions of FAT32. Is it something like 32 Gig? I use NTFS now under 2000 so it's no longer a problem.

It is 32 gig, but that's not a restriction of FAT32. FAT32 actually works up 'till some terabytes.

The 32 gig restriction was coded into win2000 by the MS programmers to "force" people to start using NTFS (which doesn't have this restriction) instead of FAT32.

i'm sure that if you use partition magic, you can get around the restriction in windows. i think it only prevents you from creating, not from actually having a 32gig+ partition

You are correct. This does work. Also, you can create a bigger partition on a win98 system. It only doesn't work in win2000 and XP (I believe)

Win2000 will work great with fat32 partitions greater than 32gig, but won't allow for them to be created.

It is 40 gigs. Is this partitioning magic you speak of a hard thing to figure out?

You can't have bigger drives in Win2000 than 137GB unless you use SP3 and a registry hack, but I'm not sure if that is for FAT32 or NTFS. A friend of mine ran into that when he wanted to install his new 200GB drive....

Stig

Nope. Very easy. But it is about $70 IIRC.
edit: link here .

-Zeke

You can't have bigger drives in Win2000 than 137GB unless you use SP3 and a registry hack

I've heard about this, but haven't reached that limit myself...yet. For future use it would come in handy to know what this reg hack is. Do you have a link for this? (or is simply installing SP3 sufficient?)
Thx!

Searching for 137GB on micro$oft gave me these two links:

48-bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows 2000 and How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP

Stig

a windows 98 boot disk and you can creat the >32gig partition
once you boot back into 2k it will be quite happy to use it

Thanks a lot! This info will sure come in hand some day soon now.