[dencorso]

So, I was misinformed. Bad news indeed. So much for my last hopes...
Well, your info settles it, Queue. There's no chance of us getting a better NDD32 for 9x/ME.
And on the basis of what I reported some posts above, for partitions above about 250 GB,
SCANDSKW can be used to check the file system, but to do a surface test the DOS utilities
SCANDISK or NDD are the only way to go. Thanks a lot, Queue! You rock.

[Wolfgang16]

Hi all,

I got an 500GB IDE drive WD5000AAKB, made in XP one extended partition including one logical drive. I formatted it using fat32format -c32, i.e. with 16kB clusters instead of 32KB, so it has 30,508,600 clusters. Then I moved it into my Win98 system. With DriveImage2002 I made an image of another drive, which consists of about 42 files of 2GB size. I copied that repetitively to the 500GB drive until 95% was full. Up to this WinME ScanDskW and Defragment worked fine. Of course there was nothing to do for Defrag. I let DriveImage check some of the copied files.

Then I started some work on the big drive, generating some smaller files and moving a few GB around. After that ScanDskW showed the out-of-memory message. Defragment still worked. When it finished, ScanDskW still showed out-of-memory, but after a reboot it worked (no surface test). At this point there were 1,253,082 clusters free. Then I unpacked an about 2GB RAR archive, after that ScanDskW showed again the out-of-memory message, after reboot it worked.

As far as I remember in the FAT there are 4 bytes per cluster. When ScanDskW has to held 2 FATs in memory it needs about 240MB. This could be the origin of the limitation.

I use a standard Win98SE modified with Maximus decims BHDD3.0, but instead of the English I use the localized German (ME) versions. I have 512MB memory.

bye
Wolfgang

EDIT: I did some further testing: upgraded memory to 786,432 kiB and added MaxFileCache=356352 to system.ini according to the recommendation of Igor Leyko, but this didn't change anything. I can run ScanDskW only after a fresh reboot, otherwise the out-of-memory message shows up.

This post has been edited by Wolfgang16: 21 March 2009 - 06:47 AM

[rloew]

DOS SCANDISK can handle a 1.5TB Partition without problems and did not complain when given a 2TB experimental Partition.

Windows ME SCANDISK and DEFRAG can handle more than 1TB, but the Partition must be Formatted with 64KB Clusters, which is non-standard.