You won't even get away with a three gigabyte drive size when performing a Windows NT installation, but many of the imaging tools on the market allow you to grow your partition to the full size of your drive. Partition Magic has allowed this for some time as well. What a great thing- one big "C" drive- 20, 30, 40 gigabytes!

Now the bad news. Even though you can grow it as big as you like, there is at least one good reason to exercise some restraint. At boot time, only the first 7.8 gigabytes can be seen which will be a problem if an installation should move a needed file outside that range. It may seem unlikely if you are only using a couple of gig- but you are venerable nonetheless. Once such file you are likely to encounter this problem with is "c:\winnt\system32\c_1252.nls" 

Your screen will show something like this:

OS Loader V4.01

Disk I/O Error Stats=00000001

Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
c:\winnt\system32\c_1252.nls

Unfortunately there is not much you can doabout it, you may get lucky with an emergency repair disk- but for me this has meant a system rebuild. Recommendation: Keep your C drive to 7.7 gigabytes on NT 4.0 NTFS formatted systems!

If it is too late for you to limit the partition space one visitor offers their means of recovery in our imaging message board, "We have deleted this file using a www.winternals.com tool, and then copied a fresh copy to the same location. We had to delete the file first and not simply copy over it. It took a while, but the machine revived without re-building."

A visitor offers this solution:
"You can get around the 7.8 gig limit by using the "NTLDR" from Windows 2000. We have been using it for some time now with no problems."