HD formatting utils for DOS

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Teo Zenios wrote: At one time, there were patches available to correct the error and permit some versions of MS-DOS to go to 4G. BUT, some application programs (such as "Norton fUtilities"?) also didn't grasp the difference between a signed and unsigned long int. (Early versions of DOS would permit having a drive or file that was -2G! But, copying a -2G file to your hardwrive did NOT increase the free space.) DOS >= 7 can handle FAT32. But, if you do, I'd suggest a 2G first partition followed by a 198G second partition. DOS CAN handle a larger partition, not as a local drive, but as a network drive. That's what MSCDEX is for - if you ever try to CHKDSK a CD-ROM (2/3G), DOS will tell you that that can't be done on a Network Drive! About 7? years ago, there was a "CD-ROM" emulator, that permitted accessing a hard drive through MSCDEX. It was so that you could copy a CD-ROM onto a hard drive, for faster speed, and some "only work from the CD-ROM" copy protection. There are a number of third party "device drivers" that are specifically for using drives >2G. Didn't WD give out one of those? Watch out; some might want to make your cluster size way too big. Even if you succeed, you might want to consider keeping one, preferably the first, partition <2G (so that there is SOMEWHERE on the drive that can be accessed by OS's and program that "still don't get it". Yes, there were such. But the Mac OS 7.x ones will NOT work on the PC :-) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com