X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to opendos-bounces using -f Message-Id: <200409060915.i869FcLk010641@delorie.com> From: "Michal H. Tyc" Organization: BTTR Software Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 10:51:41 +0200 X-Mailer: Arachne V1.75+/3C To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Disk Size Limits MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:30:02 -0400 (EDT), Gary Welles wrote: > I need some suggestions on what to do with an additional 5-7 > large harddisks I just finished attaching to my DR-DOS 7.03 > machine. It's over the top, but I want to sort out the DOS > possiblilties before adding a Unix. I assume you have the hardware necessare to connect so many disks (i.e., either a SCSI controller for SCSI disk or an additional tertiary/quaternary IDE channels for IDE disks). > So far I've learned that I'm limited to 8Gb per harddisk and I seem to remember that there exists a driver (from Ontrack?) which can present a hard disk larger than 8 Gb as a few logical disk of size acceptable for older DOSes which cannot use LBA. I don't remember the details, sorry. > DOS primary partitions are limited to 2Gb. While FDISK R2.13 > will allow creation of up to 4Gb (4094.6Mb) logical drives in > the extended partions, file functions crash trying to access > them. 4 Gb FAT16 partitions were supported by NT only (now they are also supported by FreeDOS, unofficial DR-DOS 7.01.xx by Udo Kuhnt, don't know about the official "DR-DOS 8.0" version); all these can access more than 8 Gb of a hard disk). These partitions have 64 Kb clusters, extremely inefficient unless you store only huge files -- which is, I guess, the purpose you need so much storage space for. > I haven't checked yet, but I'm guessing the working logical > drive limit is 2Gb, which seems to be the limit for FDISK > R1.76. This is the FAT16 limit of most versions of DOS. Hope this helps, Michal