versions of win95 that came out after august 24th 1996 had the support for fat32
https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/154997/description-of-the-fat32-file-systemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Tablei think there was a disk total size limit of 137 GB
"Windows 98 and Me do not natively support 48-bit LBA drives larger than 137 GB."this means if you have a 250gb hard drive or larger you must make a partition of 136GB or smaller and leave the rest of the drive unaccessed + unallocated; or else corruption of data will/may occur
best practice; only use 120gb or 80gb drives with win9x operating systems
obervations:
i used a 160GB IDE/ATA drive in a Computer with a GA-586-VX motherboard (1996) a Pentium 75 CPU (1994?)
with the drive attached to an ULTRA100 Promise PCI card (2001?)
the promise card showed that the 160gb drive was 149gb during the boot sequence
but trying to fdisk the drive in DOS 6.22 first created a FAT16 partition of 2047 Mbytes
after installing windows 95 i tried to create an Extended DOS partition which ended up defaulting to 19506 Mbytes
so the system was seeing my 160Gb drive as only having a combined sum total of 21553 Mbytes
so early versions of Fdisk only saw 21gb of my 160;
would love to see a full detailed document on all the different versions of fdisk right about now
https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/FDISK.htmVersions of FDISK used in the Boot Record Studies:
OS Type Filename File Size Release Date
----------- --------- --------- ---------------
MS-DOS 3.30 FDISK.COM 48,919 07-24-87 12:00a
MS-DOS 4.01 FDISK.EXE 60,935 04-07-89 12:00a
(Only 3 copies of the MBR code can be found inside FDISK prior to MS-DOS 5.0)
MS-DOS 5.0 FDISK.EXE 57,224 11-11-91 5:00a
MS-DOS 6.2 FDISK.EXE 29,334 09-30-93 6:20a
MS-DOS 6.22 FDISK.EXE 29,336 05-31-94 6:22a
(MD5 checksum is: 1b7010dcc3b84db402744751da321da8)
Windows 95(A)
(MS-DOS 7.0) FDISK.EXE 59,128 07-11-95 9:50a
Windows 95B
(MS-DOS 7.1) FDISK.EXE 63,116 08-24-96 11:11a
Windows 98
(MS-DOS 7.1) FDISK.EXE 63,900 05-11-98 7:01p
(MD5 checksum is: cf1024be244cb51adddf9aeaa8199084)
Windows 98 SE
(MS-DOS 7.1) FDISK.EXE 63,916 04-23-99 10:22p
(MD5 checksum is: 7da2cc665c38784c555225b727f7660e)
Windows ME
(MS-DOS 8.0) FDISK.EXE 66,060 06-08-00 5:00p
http://web.archive.org/web/20031207170937/www.firmware.com/support/bios/fdisk.htm
