Largest supported hard drive on Windows 2000 SP4

[clueless_furball]

I want to replace my hard drive(s) The smallest new hard drives I can find are 150 GB. Will Windows 2k SP4 support drives this big?

[Dave-H]

I want to replace my hard drive(s) The smallest new hard drives I can find are 150 GB. Will Windows 2K SP4 support drives this big?

Yes it will.

I use a 150GB FAT32 removable IDE storage drive on my system with no problems.

If you're using NTFS there should be no problem at all.

If you're using FAT32, there is a limit to how big a drive Windows 2000 can format, I believe 32GB.

There are means to work around this though if you are using FAT32 for any reason (I have to because I have a dual boot machine with Windows 98SE).

Edited July 12, 2009 by Dave-H

[Colonel O'Neill]

Are there actually limitations to Windows 2000 and the size of a hard drive (not already remedied and specific to Windows 2000)?

I installed it on a partition of a 160GB hard drive with no ill effects. As long as LBA is enabled during setup (slipstream SP5) you're good to go.

[WildBill]

I've got a 1Tb drive working on my Win2k box, formatted NTFS. I had to have EnableBigLBA turned on, but otherwise I've had no issues.

[Martin H]

Yes, adding the EnableBigLba reg-entry makes Win2k-sp4 support 48-Bit LBA adressing i.e. supporting HDDs over 137gb... If wanting to utilise this during setup, then the reg-entry needs to be added to the hive files. If using FDV's Win2k IE/Junk Removal Fileset, then this is done for you allready, and HFSLIP also does it for you if placing reg.exe(Win2kCD:\SUPPORT\TOOLS\SUPPORT.CAB) into the HFTOOLS folder...

[888]

Same here, last week I added 1TB drive to my W2K box, no problems (as expected).

But if you are going to install fresh W2K on such drive, you have to modify your install CD.

I think original W2K CD have 137GB drive size limit (I'm not sure - I haven't use my original CD for years, but considering it came out in 1999 I think I'm correct).

Of course we're talking NTFS (except for very few scenarios there is no point to use FAT32 with any NT OS anyways lol)

[clueless_furball]

How about spliting a hard drive of that size into two. Would that help?