Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Recommendations wanted for large (>100 Mb) hard disks Message-ID: <12272@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 29 Sep 88 19:57:16 GMT References: <39.23402BED@busker.FIDONET.ORG> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 18 In article <39.23402BED@busker.FIDONET.ORG> Howard.Spindel@busker.FIDONET.ORG (Howard Spindel) writes: | Yeah, DOS does only know how to count 1024 cylinders, but the Maxtor | 2190 came with a special version of SpeedStor which gets around the using the standard AT controller?? | problem (how I don't know). Anyway, I do get the extra 200 cylinders | under DOS - the disk formats to 160mb which I partition as 5 32mb disks. | SpeedStor will allow you to create partitions greater than 32mb but I | don't use them for fear of compatibility problems with other programs. | Actually, the problem was not that DOS only knows about 1024 cylinders - | it usually is a BIOS limitation rather than a DOS limitation. The usual WD controller seems to have only 10 bits for cylinder number... the DOS descriptor field in the DPB has 16 bits. As you say it could be in the BIOS, too. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me