4 gb partitions

This posting hasn´t to do with os2 directly, but more with hpfs :

I just "discovered" a very misterious feature of nt. I created a 4,5gb partition with partition magic 4.0 and formatted it with hpfs (!). My boot partition is a 600mb ntfs partition. partition magic said I have 600mb free on the hpfs partition. But when I´m in nt all filemanagers / explorers I tried, said I have only 100mb free. But I know, is it definitly more. the whole size was displayed right. So, I think the facts of partition magic were right. After I resized the partition ( < 4gb) an created a smaller second partition I can access the whole space.
My question is : can nt only handle partitions smaller than 4gb ? Or the hpfs file format ? . Like I saied, creating the partition wasn´t a problem.
I use nt 4 sever with sp3. My bios is from 1996 (award) with lba support. I also tried all options to set "auto".