what was it ?

Eric Schuele e.schuele at computer.org
Sun Sep 18 12:45:09 PDT 2005


dick hoogendijk wrote:
> I know it is off topic, but I trust you guys in this group to just
> remember it.
> 
> I'm building an old msdos machine for a little kid (very nostalgic).
> But I seem to rememeber that there was an issue about the space of the
> harddrive. Some kind of limit I don't remember. How large can a ms-dos
> partition be?
> 

Per KB Article 118335
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q118335/

Microsoft MS-DOS versions 4.0 and later allow FDISK to partition hard 
disks up to 4 gigabytes (GB) in size. However, the MS-DOS file 
allocation table (FAT) file system can support only 2 GB per partition. 
Because of this fact, a hard disk between 2 and 4 GB in size must be 
broken down into multiple partitions, each of which does not exceed 2 GB.

FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster 
must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a 
maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum 
number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 
2 GB.

Note that the hard disk drive must be supported by the computer's ROM 
BIOS APIs, which have a 1024-cylinder limitation, in order for FDISK to 
partition the hard disk.

HTH

-- 
Regards,
Eric


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