Re: what was it ?

From: Eric Schuele (e.schuele_at_computer.org)
Date: 09/18/05

  • Next message: *** hoogendijk: "Re: what was it ?" 
    Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:45:06 -0500
To: *** hoogendijk <***@nagual.st>

    *** hoogendijk wrote:
    > I know it is off topic, but I trust you guys in this group to just
    > remember it.
    >
    > I'm building an old msdos machine for a little kid (very nostalgic).
    > But I seem to rememeber that there was an issue about the space of the
    > harddrive. Some kind of limit I don't remember. How large can a ms-dos
    > partition be?
    >

    Per KB Article 118335
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q118335/

    Microsoft MS-DOS versions 4.0 and later allow FDISK to partition hard
    disks up to 4 gigabytes (GB) in size. However, the MS-DOS file
    allocation table (FAT) file system can support only 2 GB per partition.
    Because of this fact, a hard disk between 2 and 4 GB in size must be
    broken down into multiple partitions, each of which does not exceed 2 GB.

    FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster
    must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a
    maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum
    number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals
    2 GB.

    Note that the hard disk drive must be supported by the computer's ROM
    BIOS APIs, which have a 1024-cylinder limitation, in order for FDISK to
    partition the hard disk.

    HTH 

    -- 
Regards,
Eric
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