Partition sizes

Due to some Win98 installation troubles and some frustration, I'm only using 12GB of a 120GB hard drive (one 10GB and one 2GB partition). But now all of my hardware is working, and I don't want to spend hours doing it all over again.

Is there any (free) way of increasing the size of a FAT32 partition?

Win98 is absolutely fine with partitions up to 64gb. If a partition is larger than that, fdisk and format will report wrong partition size (its true size minus 64 gigs). But these programs will still do their job right (at least format would). As long as you're partitioning with manufacturer's provided software, you'll be okay. Another and more serious limit is 137gb. Scandisk, defrag and maybe some other Win98 programs won't work because they're 16-bit. Other than that, I think windows will still work (not sure if it'd be able to boot from a partition this large). In other words: if your partitions are no larger than 137 gigs, everything is fine.

Your problem sounds more like a BIOS constraint. Check the BIOS date, upgrade it if you know how to do it. If you don't or just don't want to mess with upgrading, try to make the primary partition less than 8.4 gigs. Then the BIOS will recognize the disk as an 8.4 gig one, but win98 will see all of it. However, if you're going to use fdisk, BIOS must see the whole disk size. Try partitioning on another computer if this is the case.

Hope this helped a bit.

EDIT: oh, I missed the fact that you don't want to reinstall. Maybe just do a backup (copy ALL files, including system/hidden files), repartition and then copy the files back. I used to restore from such backups quite a few times, and everything was fine.

I think there are programs that let you increase the size of partitions. Linux can do it, too. You might want to defrag before you try it, though.

Partition Size eh? Huge.

Yes. There are free partitioning programs out there that can resize a partition without losing data. Unfortunately the only one that springs to mind is Partition Magic, which isn't free.

Just add the remaining space as additional partitions. I guess delete that little 2gb partition first so you don't have that little one in between.