> >> Like I originally said... By design or a bug. > > No, you ASKED whether it was by design.
Sometimes I’m overly brief. I rarely (if ever) proofread my emails and other messages. My exact wording was: So, I guess it is either be design that larger partitions do not work on the 16bit kernel or a bug somewhere in the kernel, fdisk, format chain. (typo — “be" should have been "by”) That was not a question. It was a statement and was not wrong. The design (or plan, or intent) of whoever built the kernel 86 left out support for a reason…. Otherwise, support was intended with that build and either the kernel, fdisk or format contains a bug that is preventing it from functioning correctly. > Note that your compile is 4 years old, you should probably try a > newer version anyway. Maybe Jeremy can say something about which > version he recommends for 1.3 as being upgraded AND stable :-) I think he said he was working on one. > >> Overall, I think a better solution would be for the kernel team (PerditionC) >> to >> build the 8086 kernel with a comparable feature set to the 386 kernel where >> possible. > > It is normal that the default 8086 compile is without FAT32: The > 8086 has at most 640 kB RAM and you do not want to waste RAM for > a feature which you do not need. Very few PC XT have 100 GB disk. I would suspect most have under 100mb drives. > > It takes several kilobytes to support FAT32 and there are no HMA, > XMS, UMB or EMS on most 8086 to compensate by relocating things. > >>> You should probably change the floppy distro to somehow prevent >>> the user from creating FAT32 partitions if you decide to keep >>> the current, FAT16-only kernel on the floppy distro. > > Thinking about this, you could make TWO boot floppies: One for 386 > with FAT32 for people who simply have no CD/DVD writer or fail to > do the tricks needed to open ISO files on harddisk. And one for the > REAL 8086 users, with FAT16-only kernel and disabled FDISK FAT32. That could be done. But feels it unnecessary. The Floppy Edition installer runs fine under either 86/386 kernel. It also determines what cpu is being used (8086, 186, 286, 386, 486, 586, 686, DOSBox, QEMU, VirtualBox, VMware or generic other emulator) and installs the 386 kernel on 386+ machines and 8086 version on lesser. It also customizes its installed packages based on known hardware support. IE, prackage requires 386 does not get installed on a 286. But, maybe it does not need to come down to RAM wastage or lack of support. I have not looked at the kernel’s code. But, it may be possible to make free the memory used to support FAT32 when it is not booted from a FAT32 Drive, then user could use aa FAT32 device driver, that brings support on other disks than boot or just unloads itself when the boot disk required FAT32. However, I doubt anyone would want to spend any time on implementing that. > > FDISK has many obscure command line options, so there probably > are some which could achieve that ;-) > > Eric > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
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