NT4 hard drive size limits?

[Nomen]

I tried searching for this on the web in general and also here at msfn and couldn't find anything.  

Other than perhaps a 2 tb max which is a common limit for a lot of motherboard/OS combinations, does NT4 (SP6) have any specific limitation on hard drive size - specifically for IDE drives?  I'm currently running a couple of NT4 servers (one on a P3 motherboard, another on a P4 motherboard), both currently have 80 gb drives, and I'm thinking of cloning them to 240 gb SSD and then using a small IDE-SATA adapter to run them off the SSD instead.  So I'd be going from 80 gb to 240 gb in this case, which would cross the 137 gb LBA barrier.

[jaclaz]

The usual 137 GB barrier or 28-bit LBA, you need a suitable driver (not the built-in ATAPI.SYS) or UniATA:

https://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/bigdisk.htm

jaclaz

[Nomen]

So none of the service packs for NT4 addressed the 28-bit LBA issue?  We know that XP-SP0 had the issue and was fixed relatively quickly in 2001 or 2002, and win-2K also had the issue and was fixed, but MS did not fix the issue with NT4?  Perhaps because SP 6a was released in Nov 1999 - this predates any of the 28-bit LBA fixes from MS I guess.

Note this from wikipedia:

-----------

Service Pack 7 was planned at one stage in early 2001, but this became the Post SP6a Security Rollup and not a full service pack, released on July 26, 2001, 16 months after the release of Windows 2000 and nearly three months prior to the release of Windows XP.[40]

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So I guess there was no LBA-28 fix in that security rollup?

Can no files from Win-2K be used by NT4 in this regard?

Does the Intel Application Accelerator package apply to (and therefore fix) NT4's problem with LBA-28?

 

[Ximonite]

53 minutes ago, Nomen said:

Does the Intel Application Accelerator package apply to (and therefore fix) NT4's problem with LBA-28?

The issue is in Windows NT 4's ATA driver, so using a 3rd party ATA driver like the one included in Intel Application Accelerator will completely remove the need to fix the issue in your situation.

Edited November 18, 2020 by Ximonite

[jaclaz]

No.

No,

Who knows?

No.

No.

Cannot really say, it may depend on BIOS, chipset and even IDE cables, let alone adding in the chain an IDE-SATA converter.

You can try, and test thoroughfully, if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

Now, is the update to 240 GB actually *needed*?

Or could you try using a 128 GB SSD and it would be enough?

BTW, remember that you can have a 240 GB SSD and on it a 128 GiB/137 GB partition/volume on it without issues. 

AFAICR, nothing changed in the last 10 years or so:

jaclaz

[Ximonite]

9 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Cannot really say, it may depend on BIOS, chipset and even IDE cables, let alone adding in the chain an IDE-SATA converter.

Based on the fact that Nomen mentioned using Intel Application Accelerator and said they are Pentium 3 and 4 machines, it's safe to assume that the chipsets are Intel 8xx chipsets. The BIOS may or may not have an effect. I don't know enough about BIOSes to know what determines if a BIOS can boot from a drive over 137GB. All I can say for sure is that Windows NT 4 will be fine if you use a driver that supports LBA-48, like the one included in Intel Application Accelerator.