Can you use an 1 TB external hard drive in WINDOWS 98?

[Majestic]

A client of mine called me asking if he could use a 1 TB (usb) external drive on his win98se machines. Without going too much into it, basically this is a lumber manufacturing company where they are using old machinery, not worth it to invest to update as it's too expensive.

I have already updated all the proper usb drivers and can read my sandisk and patriot xporter 16 GB keys on the win98se machines with no issue.

From what I understand, for the FAT32 file system the maximum partition size is 2 TB. However, is it possible to properly read and write ? I've read conflicting articles and I'd like to know if anybody here can shed some light on this?

The drive (any drive) would be preformatted of course. It MAY be already in NTFS and in that case, would I need to get a third party program to read the ntfs in win98 ? (I'd assume so). Alternatively, is it even possible to format a FAT32 Drive in Win98se as big as 1 TB in one partition? I believe there's a microsoft update to at least read a drive this size in FAT32.

The end-goal of this is to backup all the machines over the network onto this external drive.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Majestic

 

[JosephLeo]

Well, I'm not 100% sure. But I don't think you can just plug and play, but play and pray.

After some quick googling I found this on Seagate's forums. Sorry I couldn't really solve your issue here.

Also, if the customer has a 1TB drive...no, even knows that one exist then why is (s)he still using Windows 98?

 

[Majestic]

Well, I'm not 100% sure. But I don't think you can just plug and play, but play and pray.

After some quick googling I found this on Seagate's forums. Sorry I couldn't really solve your issue here.

Also, if the customer has a 1TB drive...no, even knows that one exist then why is (s)he still using Windows 98?

Hi JosephLeo..

I read the forum post and actually I have already installed those drivers.

The reason why my client is still using win98se on most all his machines is because in order to update his machinery which is TIED to win98 he would be forced to buy new machinery which would cost $100k or so. It's really a no brainer at the moment. Granted there are a few machines on XP now and I've been using emulation successfully in vmware to get a few to work the fact remains that 95% of his machines couldn't handle XP anyway. He'll need to invest heavily to update all the software and hardware. The whole company is running on 98 software still.. accounting and all.

in any case, thanks for the post...... still need some assistance

Majestic

 

[JosephLeo]

Ouch. This is why your company is always supposed to make sure that your never dependent on an Operating System and that an upgrade will be easy. But $100,000 of machinery then cost around $5,000 today. That's not a terrible price tag in retrospect.

Anyway, I would just go with the >137 GB hard drives and waste some space instead of using unofficial methods/drivers/firmware.



BRAINSTORM EDIT What if you partitioned the hard drives into 8 125GB partitions?

Re-Edit I also noticed all you want to do is a simple back up. Why don't you set up a local server on your laptop and just upload the files to it first and then onto his external hard drive if all he wants is a backup? And if he doesn't trust you with that data- then invest $200 in setting up a Mini-ITX Atom box and use it as a server.

 

[chrisaroz]

If they have a few machines on XP, why not put it on one of those and map a drive from the Win98 Machine?

 

[Majestic]

JosephLeo: Hmmm.. yes I suppose that would be the right way to go (setting up a little server). However they have 2 locations of which they want to backup both.

christaroz: Yup, looks like that is the solution however since they do have two locations (something I did not consider before) where one location has an xp machine and the other does not, perhaps I'll have to set up a small xp backup "server" at the other location.

Thanks both of you I think I have my answers. One thing though is I would still like to know if it's possible to read and write in windows 98 to one of these 1 TB drives without issue.

Thanks,

Majestic

 

[bagellad]

cant you just buy some 60-80 gig ide's still?

 

[Tweak]

http://en.kioskea.net/contents/repar/fat32.php3

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en;184006

Bottom of first page shows theoretical sizing with cluster size adjusted...perhaps just a smaller drive and some offsite/online backup solution would better suit this client?