So, if I translate this. The person wanting to consider freedos, could not do as I can do on my ms dos 7.1 system, format a 20 gig drive split it into 10 gig sizes and have freedos recognize the fat 32 partitions thus created? Likewise they would be limited to a 2 gig drive regardless in freedos? Dr dos 703 cannot see a 12gig drive, so I am correct in saying that freedos cannot see this either? i have not used a fat 16 partition structure in pure DOS for so long, I honestly did not remember these limitations. Never mind the other distinctions you are trying to make, the install they are trying is on a Pentium 3 dell laptop. so no one is considering a tig drive, never referenced that. Their goal is to learn if freedos can do something Dr dos 703 cannot do. Karen
On Sun, 11 Nov 2012, Eric Auer wrote: > > 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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
