Hi, to continue the thread... Slightly below 2 GB are the normal limit for classic FAT16, although variants exist. However, if you use FAT32, then you could put 2 TB into a single drive letter! A Terabyte is 1000 or 1024 Gigabyte, depending on whom you ask ;-)
Another limit is the MBR partitioning scheme itself: You can only partition the first 2 TB with it, so disks which are bigger than that usually just do not use MBR... Larger disks might have bigger sectors (4096 bytes instead of 512 bytes, sometimes with 512e emulation to still allow access in classic 512 byte chunks, just slower) which can confuse aspects of DOS / booting / partitioning, so I think you first see 4k disks without emulation first as USB disk, less likely as internal disk. A generic solution to the 2 TB limit of MBR partitioning is to use EFI / UEFI partitioning, as already supported by a number of operating systems and a few BIOS vendors. I think booting via EFI now happens on demand, for example if disks are too big for MBR. The complexity of supporting EFI inside the DOS kernel is not very high, so sooner or later we can add that. You would still have a limit of 2 TB per partition (per drive letter) but that should be no problem... :-) Note that a Terabyte-sized FAT32 partition is likely to be somewhat bulky and slow to use in plain DOS, so unless you really want to have so much DOS data, I suggest to use, at least for the C: drive, a smaller size. You can partition the rest of your disk for something else, e.g. more drives. > There's FreeDOS kernels only supporting FAT16 on which you'd have above > issue yes. However by default the FAT32-enabled kernel is used, thus > limiting you to slightly over 2000 GB total capacity. FreeDOS can > see/use FAT32 partitions up to this 2000 GB size each. > > All in all, every normally used harddisk will work. Just don't buy a 3TB > or 4TB harddisk if intended for usage with DOS. > > Bernd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_nov _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
