15 Mar
2001
15 Mar
'01
1:31 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great ajp166 once stated:
allocated
Ah, that's what I get for not double checking the reference material. In
looking over it, it is indeed 10 bits for cylinder and six bits for sector
number.
I know all about that---I used to write code under MS-DOS (And the Tandy
Color Computer and AmigaOS, all unprotected (memory wise) systems).
Assembly code, no less.
It was thus said that the Great Peter Joules once
stated:
> 3)
> Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need
that
much
space anyway.
That's a BIOS limitation; talk to IBM about that one---they only 10 bits for sector number in the INT 13h disk IO
call.
Wrong. 1024 was a hardware limitation of the early MFM controller cards
and the bios honored it. FYI it was CYLINDERS not sectors. 1024 sectors
would have only been 512k! -spc
(Doesn't remember MS-DOS crashing quite so much ... )
DOS being unprotected could crash, usually after the application
wiped it from memory like CP/M! Any unprotected OS would be
vunerable to being smashed by a runaway app. Experience with DOS 3.11 and 5.0 is that for an
unprotected OS
it was fairly solid and not inclined to kill itself. I have two systems
that live as DOS with uptimes measured in months.
-spc (I never had any real problems with 2.11 either ... )