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Path: utzoo!watmath!wateng!broehl
From: broehl@wateng.UUCP (Bernie Roehl)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Cluster size and Hard drives
Message-ID: <994@wateng.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-May-84 09:12:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: wateng.994
Posted: Tue May 15 09:12:39 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 16-May-84 03:29:51 EDT
References: <600@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 18

Yes and no; simply patching bytes in the BPB will change how the disk
looks to the OS (assuming the driver is well-written and pays attention
to the BPB instead of blithely assuming particular values).  However, 
make sure that you change *all* the neccessary values in the BPB; changing
only some of them will drive dos nuts.

Needless to say, you should only do such things to a freshly-formatted
volume, less you corrupt what's already out there.

So much for the "yes" part.  The reason there's a trade-off between volume
size and cluster size is because you have finite-sized FAT's.  Yes, you
can increase the FAT size (i.e. the number of FAT's), but you have to be
*damn* sure that DOS is clever enough to use such big FATS's.
I haven't enough information on the internal workings of DOS to say for
sure if it does or not; perhaps some of the folks at Microsoft would care
to elaborate on all of this for the net?
-- 
        -Bernie Roehl    (University of Waterloo)