5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
9:46 a.m.
> 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.