I need to format a 4.3gig blank drive from dos what is the best way of stopping it just formating 2gig.

Hi, DOS 6.22 and early versions have 2.1G limitation for partition size. If you're using such DOS version you need to break your drive at least in 3 partitions. To get single 4.3G partition you need to use DOS 7.1 which came with Win95B and Win98, and supports FAT32 file system. When you run FDISK from DOS 7.1 it asks you if you want to enable big drives support. You answer YES and then you can create one big partition 4.3 G in size. Good luck, Igor M

Hi! Igor M. I saw you comments about Fat32 and was wondering if you could answer a couple of MS-Dos theory questions? I am doing an assignment and can not find answers to a few questions."What are the Hard Disk size limitations with MS-DOS FAT?" The above question was asked in relation to the following statement. "Supports noncontiguous file storage and will dynamically allocate and deallocate disk space to a file provided there is enough space on the disk" I also have another question. Was all memory contiguous in all versions of MS-DOS ? Regards, George D.

Hi, I can answer only 1st of your questions. As I understand the question is about MS-DOS 6.22 and early. The DOS version from 4.0 to 6.22 use FAT16 system. It mean they use 16 bit (2 bytes) coding for cluster number which give the limitation of 65535 clusters in one partition. Because size of cluster must be power of 2 and must be 16 bit in length the biggest cluster size is 32768. So we have 65535*32768=2147450880 (2.1G) limitation for partition size. DOS 3.30 and early versions used FAT12 file system with just 12-bit coding for cluster number. So maximum number of clusters was 4095 and maximum size of cluster was 8192 so the maximum size of partition in DOS 3.x was 4095*8192=33546240 (32M). Good luck, Igor M

I like to have the last new file fdisk.exe for windows 98. thanks!!!

Tiily Windows 98 (MS-DOS 7.01) F-DISK will only work with Win98. If you need it or any other version, download the Boot Disk from www.bootdisk.com it has it on the disk (This has been asked for so many times- Also try Windows 9x Forum)