whats the maximum size hard drive you can use in windows nt. i installed nt on my laptop and i had to partition my 40gb hard drive as a 4gb, i could make it bigger. i just want to know how to partition the hard drive as the full thing.

Compaq Armada 1700 / 40GB Fujitsu Hard Drive 5400RPM

It depends on whether you are formatting it as FAT or NTFS. If it's FAT, you are limited to 4 GB partitions. Otherwise, NTFS can theoretically go as high as 16 exabytes, but there's probably a practical limit somewhere on the order of terabytes.

In any event, you might have some other limiting factors, such as BIOS limitations. Windows NT setup will limit you to initially, and your boot partition (typically C:) may be limited to 8 gigs, but your extended partition (typically D:) can be made virtually as large as you wish. In the case of my 45 GB HD, I had to install SP5 in order to see the remainder of the disk (and in order to see both of my floppy drives), so consider this if you don't see everything in NT's Disk Administrator.

Glitchman is correct, except that with NT4 the partition where NT is installed (typically C) can ONLY be 4GB, no matter what type of format is done. It was a limitation with NT4.

What you need to do is ensure that all the service packs are installed, then go into the disk manager, and take the rest of the space and make it a D drive, and make sure you install all your apps there.

True but not true.

You can install NT to larger than 4gig by following this procedure
http://www.ntfaq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13922

You can use utilities to expand the native install of 4gig but you should NOT exceed 7.8gig for system/boot partition. This is due to a ntfs/bios boot bug that was corrected in W2K.

If you exceed this limit you can render your system unbootable due to the boot loader files getting parked beyond the limit the bios can read to boot.

FYI