MS-DOS version (was: What's best to do?? classically speaking

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Fri Jun 22 18:13:47 2001

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Jeff Hellige wrote:
> >Upper limit -- isn't it still 2gb per partition unless special disk manager
> >software is installed? NT has no restriction theoretically.
> Under DOS with 16bit access it's still 2gig per partition. I
> believe it's 8gig per partition under the 32bit access of
> 95/98/NT/2000. Boot from a plain DOS disk for the install of one of
> those though and you'll still be stuck with 2gig.

FAT16 is limited to 2G per partition. (it can be anything from
-2147483648 to 2147483648). In NT, you can have a 4G FAT16 partition
(they finally learned the difference between signed and unsigned numbers)

Through corruption of directory entries (signed numbers!!!), you can have
a file with a NEGATIVE size! When my drive was getting crowded, I stepped
on a floppy to make a -2G file and tried to copy that to the hard drive,
figuring that that would increase my free space by 2G. It didn't work.


FAT32 and NTFS don't have the 2G limit. I don't know what their limits
are.

I think that the 8G limit was a BIOS limit.

What limits still exist for the high end?

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred        cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Fri Jun 22 2001 - 18:13:47 BST

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