Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!dclemans.falcon
From: dclemans.falcon@mntgfx.mentor.com (Dave Clemans)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Disk limitations
Message-ID: <1988Nov14.151753.28762@mntgfx.mentor.com>
Date: 14 Nov 88 23:17:52 GMT
References: <3482@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Organization: Mentor Graphics Corporation, Beaverton Oregon
Lines: 31

From article <3482@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>, by grieggs@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (John T. Grieggs):
> 16 Mb per partition * 12 partitions = 192 Mb
> 
> If anyone knows a not-too-illegal way around this limit, I would like
> to hear about it.  I know of no way to effectively use a 300 Mb unit
> on an ST at this time.
> 

There has been some pressure from developers on Compuserve to get
Atari to "fix" the bug that limits partitions to 16 megabytes,
instead of the 32 megabytes that the present FAT could presently
address.  They've been resisting it, based on the scenario:

    "naive" person A with a "fixed" OS builds a hard disk with big
    partitions and then fills that partion so that more than 16
    megabytes is used.  Then that hard disk is taken to a machine
    that doesn't have a "fixed" OS and tries to use it; that
    machine proceeds to scramble the disk

(or other similar situations).  One suggestion (made by somebody
at Atari Canada?) was a different partition type, so that "old"
machines would ignore big hard disk partitions.

(And of course if the GEM filesystem was made compatible to MSDOS/PCDOS 4.0,
then more than 32 megabytes could be addressed...).

Currently there is no way to address more than 192 megabytes as
a GEM filesystem.  However you can use any amount of space as a raw disk
(supposedly you just give the appropriate flags to the Rwabs call...)

dgc