[TopAce]

Since I am in a mood of typing a lot.

For finishing the A-level exams, I was given a 160GB Hard drive to replace my 'old', 40GB one. I installed Windows 98 on this new HD and started transfering the important files from the old winchester to the new one. I installed all drives, DirectX, WinZIP and anything else that is needed.
When I tried playing games, I started experiencing crashes. Namely, with Jedi Academy, KotOR, Turok, Jedi Outcast Single player and with FreeSpace 2.
The only games which don't crash are StarCraft, Quake III Arena and Jedi Outcase Multiplayer.
As far as I tried to fix the crashes, I noticed a possible reason why FS2 crashes, but I still haven't tried to fix it (Go to the SCP forum). As for the crashes of the other games, I am completely out of ideas, although I have not tried to fix on any of them. I tried changing the graphics settings but the crashes were still present.

In addition, there are other odd things about this Hard drive, too: Scandisk simply can't scan this HD, implying on having too little memory, Windows says I have 20GB of free space and 140 is taken up . This is strange, because if I manually measure the size of the files (Select All -> Properties), I can see that only 30GBs are taken up.

One of my class-mates has given me the advice to simply reinstall the whole Windows once again and the problem should disappear, but I would like to know if you know an easier solution. I guess you are not new to problems with huge Hard drives, I was amazed when people posted the size of their winchesters.

[vyper]

Here's my advice, dump 98. iirc the FAT32 system has issues with big drives.

[TopAce]

I have a Windows XP available, too, but it would still require me to reinstall the whole computer. I was thinking of this solution,  too, it would have been the next thing to do in case reinstalling again under Win98 would not work.

[kode]

partition the drive up into smaller chunks. I'm not entirely sure about win98, but I do know that vanilla XP, pre SP1, didn't support drives larger than ~120gb. so the same should apply to win98.

and yeah, w98 has issues. it's no longer supported. buy xp. or switch to *nix. I think all those games listed can be made to work under it, and openoffice seems to be pretty good now-adays. if you aren't hardcore enough to want to learn LaTeX or pdfTeX...

[TopAce]

I solved the problem with FreeSpace. As I said, I replaced the "cruiser" flags with "corvette" and there are no more crashes.

Still, I have to install XP, when I have the mood to. I think I will finish ITHOV first.

[pyro-manic]

FAT32 can only deal with partitions up to a certain size (possibly 32Gb, though I can't remember). You need to have all your partitions smaller than that, or install a newer version of Windoze that uses the NTFS file system. That's where your problem is.

[karajorma]

Pyro's hit the nail on the head there. FAT32 drives can only deal with 32GB of data in a partition and it sounds like TopAce hasn't partitioned his drive.

Using Select All >> Properties won't give you the size of the system and hidden files on C: That means you could easily be missing things like the swap file etc that put you over the 32GB limit.

[TopAce]

My older hard drive was 40GB and ran Windows 98SE without any problem.

[WMCoolmon]

Move zig.

For great justice.

[karajorma]

Did you ever fill the whole drive?

There's a nice discription of the various hard drive limits here

Scroll down to the 32GB limit.

[TopAce]

I will install XP as soon as I get the mood to and see if the problem gets solved.

[WMCoolmon]

Meh. XP.

"Hey Microsoft, I just bought a new motherboard. Can I use my computer?"
"Yes, because you've been a GOOD boy, Jimmy."