Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:59:37 +0100 From: Philip Nienhuis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] BIOS 8GB Limit - Fix?
David Chien wrote: > Well, while EZ-Drive and W9x may sound like overkill, it has worked perfectly > for me for 3+ years continously on my W9x dual-boot setup w/o a single problem > whatsoever. That said, it can be the 'easy' fix for most non-technical users. Agreed, David. But I look at it this way: Before W. Bockey sorted it all out early 2002, EZ-drive or other disk managers were simply the only available way to go. But now that the technical details are known I think that a cleaner solution, w/o any trickery, is preferrable. And that cleaner solution is so ridiculously easy: use something different than DOS/Win9x FDISK.... E.g., Partition Manager might do - IIRC there used to be a free demo download. Disk managers do bear some risks, I can see two issues (see below). The reason is that they need space for themselves and so have to show the operating system(s) a view of the hard disk which hides away the disk manager code. Indeed, much like the Libretto BIOS hides the hibernation space + everything beyond.... AFAIK in many cases the first HD track or cylinder (where also the real MBR resides) is hidden, and the various operating systems are presented a view in which all tracks or cylinders are shifted one up. Issue 1: If you use a disk manager, be sure that it is always initialized *before* any opsys gets a chance to have a look at the real hard disk. Especially during their installation, some operating systems disable boot managers and other stuff, possibly also disk managers, and that's when one should be cautious. That said, I think modern disk managers *and* modern operating systems might/should be able to cope with this. Issue 2 comes out when you change your HD and use the "disk managed" one somewhere else, e.g. in an external USB/PCMCIA drive or 2nd HD in a desktop. In that case, the disk manager never gets a chance to initialize and you bear the very real risk of not being able to access the old data on that decommissioned HD, dependent on how the disk translation has been implemented. Sometimes you are lucky, but there is no guarantee. In addition, the whole issue pertains only to Win9x and it only relates to the > 8GB problem, the hibernation area issue is not solved. And no, I don't hate disk managers - it is just that I prefer to avoid unnecessary complications right from the start, even at the cost of a tiny little bit more work. Disk managers must be used always, partitioning tools just once. > Anyways, BIOS disassembly isn't much farther away than a quick dump - believe I > even dumped the L50/J BIOS myself a long time ago and had a brief look at it - > see Mailing List Archives. But because BIOS programming is much more sensitive > to errors, I didn't touch it to try and change things then. > > Maybe if we ask one of those guys doing the Open-Source PC boot BIOS project > for a little hack if we send them an image of the BIOS? They should know how > to do it since they're trying to write a complete linux boot BIOS for a PC from > scratch. Hopefully the hibernation routines (which are responsible for the 8 GB FDISK limit) are not too much interwoven with the ACPI parts. I'm getting more and more convinced that Toshiba has deliberately implemented the L100/110 hibernation as just a big kludge (to save time?), and kludges of this kind are seldomly easy to fix. If it were an easy fix, Toshiba engineers probably would have done it right away. But I do share your hopes in this respect. > side note on that other thread on mail delays: got my reply to this in just 1 > minute from post to receipt from the Mailing List. Same here. Best wishes, Philip ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ - Archives -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************
