>> I keep LBA disabled, for I partitioned the HD with >> 4-sector clusters. > > Clusters and LBA have nothing directly in common. Partitions are made up > only > of sectors. It's only subsequent formatting that gives birth to logical > clusters, after the act of partitioning is over. LBA is about addressing > sectors, regardless how formatting groups them or not.
Right. Additionally, I want to clarify this: the FAT file system clusters should not ever be relevant to your BIOS in any way. The BIOS (in most or all cases) does not know anything about files, file system clusters, file systems or (MBR) partitioning beyond access to "numbered" sectors. Whether the sector "numbering" is LBA or CHS, or whether low-level translations such as "1 BIOS sector is 8 physical sectors" are used does not in any way affect DOS in dealing with FAT file system clusters. The units of such low-level translations might be called clusters by your BIOS or hard disk vendor, but (by what you wrote us) I do not believe these are associated with the FAT file system clusters in any way. Besides, you don't have to turn on LBA. If CHS addressing works correctly and your entire disk can be accessed by it, it usually doesn't matter much whether you enable LBA. It would be interesting to know what size of these units are used by your BIOS and hard disk. When you say "1 logical block = 8 sectors", how large is one logical block and how large is one sector? When you say sector, do you mean the "physical" sector on the hard disk? Likewise, do you mean the unit accessible by software when you say "logical block"? Does this translation happen only with LBA access, or both with CHS and LBA access? It would be nice if you could find out more about this. Regards, Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization is moving to the mainstream and overtaking non-virtualized environment for deploying applications. Does it make network security easier or more difficult to achieve? Read this whitepaper to separate the two and get a better understanding. http://p.sf.net/sfu/hp-phase2-d2d _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
