5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
10:06 a.m.
On 06/05/2013 12:46 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
There is never enough but, it was the typical amount when that was a
current.
Forgot that fun little detail... Been a long time since I've
use
anything before DOSV5.
Many systems there were other limits due to
implementation like 1gb disk
addressing.
LBA addressing mostly fixes that, if the bios supported it....
Many machines did not support more than 1MB in bios and physical.
If you needed space the LIM-SIM support on a ISA board helped.
This is where the MCA machine were often more capable than the ISA
and that leads to the bus wars....
Allison
> Is there
any value in keeping the larger drive in the unit? I would
> like to install Windows 3.1, DOS, some utils, etc., and I don't know
> if all that will spill out of 21MB or not.
TRY to get DOS 3.31 or above!
On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, allison wrote:
win3.1 is tiny and 21mb is large by that time and
standard.
surely, nobody needs more than THAT To access the larger disk you still hit the 1gb
limits, then the 4gb
limits so you cant use it all
as the bios and drivers do not have enough LBA addressing bits. To get
to 1gb just create
multiple 528mb partitions.
If you use DOS 3.30 or below, then your maximum
partition is 32M The limits
that machine suffers are the DOS/win3.1 FAT16 address limits
then the 1gb physical
address implementations limits.
2GB for FAT16
FAT16 uses a 32 bit number. BUT, somebody at MICROS~1 used a
"signed long".
Therefore, the capacity limits are from -2G to 2G, instead of 0 to 4G
NT? corrected it to an unsigned long The good news
is by 286 standards a 500mb disk was effectively HUGE and few
people actually had that.
The RAM on 286 could go to 16M, but DOS could only
access 1M, plus
slightly less than 64K (HIMEM.SYS, IFF you have A20 support)
Third party software could use that EXTENDED memory as EXPANDED memory
(LIM-SIM, etc.) for RAMDISK, print spooler, etc.