Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!brianc
From: brianc@cognos.uucp (Brian Campbell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Need info - Using large capacity hard disk w/MS-DOS
Message-ID: <2327@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 24 Feb 88 18:41:11 GMT
Article-I.D.: cognos.2327
Posted: Wed Feb 24 13:41:11 1988
References: <5561@sgistl.SGI.COM> <4583@ecsvax.UUCP> <3093@cup.portal.com> <3948@ihlpl.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: brianc@cognos.UUCP (Brian Campbell)
Organization: Cognos Incorporated, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 17

In article <3093@cup.portal.com> truett@cup.portal.com writes:
> 1) Up through version 3.2 of PC-DOS and most varieties of MS-DOS, only a
>    single DOS partition could be created by FDISK.  It was always possible
>    to have partitions for other operating systems on a drive.  Note that the
>    single DOS partition was limited to a size of 32 MB.

I always thought the restiction was on the number of clusters on the drive,
not the number of megabytes.  Theoretically, a 16-bit FAT entry ought to be
able to represent just under 65535 different clusters (half a dozen cluster
numbers have special  meanings).  This limit actually seems to be something
on the  order of  20000 different clusters  (if you want  to use  silly DOS
utilities like CHKDSK).  I determined this  "limit"  by reformatting my 20M
drive with 1k clusters and then finding that I could no longer run CHKDSK.
-- 
Brian Campbell        uucp: decvax!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!brianc
Cognos Incorporated   mail: POB 9707, 3755 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, K1G 3Z4
(613) 738-1440        fido: (613) 731-2945 300/1200, sysop@1:163/8