FEBRUARY 1998
Recently I was asked by a customer to install a larger hard drive in his PC. This is a common upgrade and a valid means of extending the usefulness of a not-quite-new computer. He and I discussed what brand and size of hard drive to install and soon decided that he should order a 4.2 gig drive from a catalog. Later, while confirming the appointment with me, he mentioned that for just pennies more he had been able to order a 6 gig drive. This seemed appropriate as he had a lot of software waiting to be loaded.
When trying to install the new hard drive as slave to his existing drive, I discovered a nasty limitation of the original version of Windows 95..... It can only see 4.2 gig on a single hard drive! So here sat his 6 gig drive, formatted and waiting, but with only 4.2 gig of it usable! Ouch!
I have since confirmed that under the original version of Windows95 only 4.2 gig can be seen on a single hard drive. This is due to a limitation of the disk formatting and handling routines. If a drive is over 2.1 gig you must partition it into units of 2.1 gig or less, AND you can have only 2 of these partitions on each drive! Hence the 4.2 gig limit on a single drive.
What to do about this?
(1) purchase hard drives 4.2 gig or less in size (good luck - they'll soon become difficult to find).
OR
(2) upgrade your Windows95 version to 95B. To purchase the current release you must buy a 'major system component' (IE motherboard & CPU) from an OEM dealer, and even then it is not cheap. To use it you must wipe your hard drive and reload everything from scratch.
OR
(3) live with use limitations of your new expensive drive. Later you can move that drive into the next computer you purchase, format it, and then use it fully.
ADDENDUM:
Windows95B, or OSR2 as it is also called, and Windows 98 both break free from this and other drive size limitations. New PCs are now shipping with Widnows 98 version 2, once again leaving the rest of us in the dust.