2 gig boot boundary

OSiriS

This is something I have never encountered before. I am presently dual booting win XP and win2k advanced server. XP is installed on a 3 gig boot partition, however within windows only 2 gigs of this is shown and usable. I had forgotten the actual size of the partition until I ran partition magic to try to expand it. Partition magic showed the partition to be 3 gigs, but mentioned something about a 2 gig boot boundary. Unfortunately the help file was typically unhelpful, so I was wondering what this is about and is there any way to make full use of the 3 gig partition. 2 gig is no where near large enough for xp, and I have been struggling to keep my free space about 80megs for a few months now.

aidan_walsh

Is this partition at the front of the disk? I know there is something that you have to install versions of Windows before a certain cylinder number so that they will be bootable...

Bollox to that. I recently installed Server2003 on an NTFS partition behind a 30GB FAT32 partition, an it worked first time. Not only that, but the sodding thing placed its bootloader behind LILO and encapsulated WindowsXP in it as well. Now whenever I select either Windows Serevr or XP in LILO I'm brought to the Windows bootloader and have to make the selection all over again.

In short, if you set up a logical partiton, you should have no bother installing Windows to it.

BTW, you are setting it up as a second (or third) OS, right?

OSiriS

Yes the partition is at the start of the drive. I amnt setting the drive up, it has been partitioned as it is now for the last 2 years, i just plain forgot i had partitioned the c: drive to be 3 gig. I'm just looking to make full use of that 3 gigs.

Dun

There can be a couple of reasons, but normally the 2GB boundary applies to DOS/FAT partitions. Can you post a screenie of Partition Magic?

Capt'n Midnight

Have a check if it's FAT16 ..

IIRC FAT16 on Dos / Win95(early versions) only went up to 2GB - BUT NT could go up to 4GB with FAT16 - but the other OS's wouldn't be able to read it.

There is also a limit of 1024 cylinders for some boot thingy PM might display that.

OSiriS

Here's a screen grab from partition magic, as you can see all my partitions are FAT 32.

Dun

Very odd indeed. By any chance, have you had ParitionMagic run a check on the partition (right-click -> Check for Errors)? Chances are that you might have to do it from the rescue floppies. Could you move your E: up to fill the space after it, and try resizing the extended partition, then resize the C: to fill the space? Might fix whatever's wrong with it.

On a seperate note I was surprised to see that Symantec have taken over PowerQuest.

OSiriS

That 300meg unused space was actually a part of the e: drive which i tried to move over to c:, but unfortunately PM didnt like how i went about it. Havent gotten around to give it another go. I'll give the error check a try though.