From what I’ve read, the first consumer Windows to have NTFS was Windows XP.
So then, how did a bunch of Windows 98 computers have drives in excess of 4GB? I remember having a 6GB drive and a 20GB drive in a PC from 1999.
I’m wondering, if these only had FAT32, how they could access such larger drives in a single partition?
You’re thinking of the 4GB file size limit on FAT32 as opposed to partition size limit, which I think was 2TB for FAT32. but there’s also the 48bit LBA problem with Win98 that limited the max partition to significantly less than 2TB.
But I think before that, win1 thru 3 regular, ran as a shell on top of MSDOS, so they might have been constrained to 4GB/file 4TB/partitions
My memory might be a bit fuzzy here, but I seem to also recall having to set up and work around the “cluster size” limits in WIn98 - namely you were limited to fat32, and limited by not really the size of the drive, but the number of allocatable “units” in the partition table - namely you could only have up to (roughly) 2^32 clusters defined (and a file is composed of 1 or more clusters). So that limited the size of each cluster to fall on that boundary. If you had a lot of small files, then you could have lots of wasted “space” (clusters that had only some data in them). It wasn’t uncommon to have a minimum cluster size of 4, 8, or even 16k for sufficiently large drives…
But again, my memory is a bit hazy. Also, this is from memory. A quick Google search (or asking ChatGPT, since this is old information) would clarify. Maybe.
I remember making a comment on a forum that I had 1GB of SDRAM in my Win98SE machine. Someone called me out and I posted a screenshot of the technical stuff of Win98SE, showing that I had indeed 1GB RAM in my PC. Thing is, I used an nVidia iGPU (nForce2, IIRC!), which took several MB’s worth of RAM for it’s own video RAM, so Win98SE never saw the full 1GB. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the screenshot image a while back.
Generally, Windows 98 can not boot from a hard drive with a capacity in excess of 127 GB, due to the limitations of 28-bit logical block addressing (LBA). What this means is that the system cannot recognize more than 2 to the power of 28 512-byte sectors. Doing that math shows you a maximum size of 127 GB (if you’re counting by 1024). Patched drivers and a compatible IDE or SCSI controller can be used to overcome this limit.
Even my 2002 vintage Unix / PowerPC PowerMac G4 suffers the same 28-bit LBA shortfall. This limitation was not unreasonable in context: by 2003, long after XP and Windows 2000 launched with NTFS support, hard disks were still only between 60 and 100 GB at the high end. High performance SCSI drives were often even lower capacity.
However the 28-bit limitation doesn’t tell the whole story, as IDE adapters were frequently even more limited in terms of cylinders, heads, and sectors (CHS) support. The CHS system pre-dated LBA and was prevalent as recently as Pentium I systems, and BIOS or controller level limitations could limit you to significantly less than the 127GB software limitation (commonly around 8 GB). CHS is likely the source of the 4GB limitation that you mention in your original post.
I still have a PIII 667Mhz (133Mhz bus) with 128MB sdram + 80GB HDD, and if I look carefully I might even find a Win98SE backup… 
Times when the graphics card occupied one slot and did not require additional power, and cooling was provided by one tiny fan. Times when the CPU needed nothing more than a box fan.
Good old times eh.
The last stand-alone release of MS-DOS (6.22) did not have FAT32 support. With FAT16, those early Windows systems were limited to 2GB partition sizes, max.
According to Wikipedia, FAT32 was introduced in August 1996 with Win95 OSR2, so even the original Win95 didn’t have large partition support.
What you’re thinking of is the maximum single file size when using the default block size for a FAT32 partition. The maximum partition size for FAT32 is 4TB if I’m not mistaken.
I used for 10 years a 320GB external drive with a FAT32 partition, originally formatted on my 1GHz P3 machine. On the same machine I first used a 40GB drive than a 100GB one both briefly with Windows 98.