21 Jun
2001
21 Jun
'01
2:12 p.m.
If you are
running DOS 3.3[0], then you can't easily exceed 32M per drive
letter. If you are running 3.31 or above, then you can go up to 500M.
There were some OEM versions of 3.3 that allowed
greater than
32meg per partition,
NO version of 3.3[0] did. NONE. NOT ANY. Only starting
with 3.31
notably Zenith's 3.3+. Is the 3.31 with 500meg
partitons a Compaq-specific item? With the exception of Zenith, I
thought the 32meg partition barrier wasn't broken until DOS 4?
Compaq released an MS-DOS 3.31, as did Zenith and a few
others. Apparently ALL 3.31 releases supported >32M.
HOWEVER, IBM did NOT release a 3.31, so 4.00 was the first
PC-DOS >32M.
There was more difference between 3.30 and 3.31 than there was between
3.31 and 4.00
BTW, the OS MINOR version is converted from a two digit decimal number
into binary for the storage of the internal ("true") OS version.
therefore, 3.30 is stored internally as release THIRTY of version THREE,
and there does not exist a version three point THREE (which would be
3.03).
Version three point thirty-one is when the 32M limitation was eliminated.
The 500M limitation was an issue of BIOS, not DOS.
Not
that I'd ever recomend the use of PC-DOS 4 to anyone.....buggy as all
heck....
Quite a few (not all) of the "bugs" in PC-DOS 4.00 were actually
incompatabilities. When they changed the drive access to cross 32M, many
programs that did "low level" disk I/O (such as Norton fUtilities) would
not work with the new OS release. InfoWorld, et al, reasoned that because
their favorite utilities worked with 3.30, but not with 4.00, that that
constituted a bug in 4.00. For version 5.00 ("new and improved"),
MICROS~1 coordinated with Norton, etc. to assure availability of upgrades
of incompatible utilities.
But as an indicator of the "thoroughness" with
which 4.x was debugged: 4.01 misreports itself as 4.00.
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
PO Box 1236 (510) 558-9366
Berkeley, CA 94701-1236