Extended BIOS translation (worth disabling?)

[Reinhold J. Gerharz]

At 16:10 02/05/1998 +0100, Peter Holzer wrote:

        ...

>Yup. For some reason Linux fdisk (like DOS fdisk) only lets you start
>partitions at cylinder boundaries. I have considered dusting off Minix
>fdisk several times, but these days I don't care about a few wasted
>Megabytes any more, and I haven't had to rebuild strange partition
>tables for some time.

This is probably to make the partitions compatible with LILO as well
as DOS. LILO's limitation is that it uses BIOS calls to actually load
the kernel, therefore inheriting the BIOS limitations. The advantage
of this is maximum and immediate compatibility with any disk drive
supported by the BIOS.

NT (can I say that?) can boot from non-BIOS compatible partitions as
long as the BIOS can at least read the boot sector. It just requires a
fully operational copy of NT installed on another disk to prepare the
target disk, which can later be removed. (I have done this, and should
point out that it can make it difficult to install some software. I
believe some installation programs check for free space in bytes, in
32 bit integers. If this value overflows, it believes there is
insufficient space. One must install a lot of other stuff before these
installation packages will work.)
--
Reinhold J. Gerharz           http://www.erols.com/rgerharz
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