28 Jun
2006
28 Jun
'06
12:10 a.m.
Teo Zenios wrote:
I was wondering if there were any drivers or utils
available that would allow a DOS or Win3.1 machine to have drive partitions over 2GB? I
know old IDE controller had hardware limitations to the drive size they can read (BIOS
issues also) but would there be a problem with raiding SCSI drives on say an old Adaptec
card to give you 20GB of space that DOS could read and write to (non booting)? I am not
worried about DOS being modified so that the individual file size can be extended, just
the available partition size so I don't have a dozen 2GB partitions.
I've been an owner of System Commander since about 1995. It won't let
you exceed problems that are built-in to DOS, but it makes life easier
all around. It can resize partitions and filesystems, so you don't lose
data repartitioning; it can store several DOS OSes in a single FAT16
partition (I have MSDOS 6.22, IBM DOS 2000, and Caldera 7.03 in the same
FAT16 2G partition), and other neat stuff.
MSDOS 6.22 boots from a single 2G or smaller primary partition 0 --
that's it, there's no way of getting around it. SCSI or IDE, doesn't
matter: Must be primary partition 0, and smaller than 2 gig. Later
versions are a little more flexible; I believe IBM PC DOS 2000 can boot
from any primary partition, for example, but don't
quote me on that.
FreeDOS might be more flexible in that area as well.
Now, if all you want is more drive space, just create an extended
partition and create as many 2G logical drives as you like. Depending
on your BIOS and drive, you may run out of drive letters before space :-)
If you need partitions/drives over 2G, you'll need to run something
other than FAT16 DOS. Win9x FAT32 (shows up as "MS-DOS 7", whatever
that is) allows for extended partition sizes up to 127G I think, again,
don't quote me on that.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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