Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:45:06 -0500 From: Eric Schuele <e.schuele@computer.org> To: dick hoogendijk <dick@nagual.st> Cc: fbsdq <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: what was it ? Message-ID: <432DC3C2.7090206@computer.org> In-Reply-To: <20050918133429.35e96a73.dick@nagual.st> References: <20050918133429.35e96a73.dick@nagual.st>
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dick 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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