*BSD News Article 11139


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From: peterson@plains.NoDak.edu (Bruce Peterson)
Subject: Re: IDE Drive Translation
Summary: DOS limitations
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Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1993 19:42:29 GMT
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In article <1993Feb7.100410.12294@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> you write:
>
>We have actually partitioned the whole disk to DOS and get 510Mbyte from
>chkdsk, using MSDOS 5.0 fdisk and OS.
>
>The rumours(?) that DOS cannot handle more than 1024 cylinders is therefore
>false. 

DOS will not handle more than 1024 cylinders without special drivers (such
as Disk Manager's dmdrvr.bin).  In your case, fdisk used 1024 of the 1036
cylinders--the 12 cylinder loss was too small to notice their absence.

My drive has 1416 cylinders, which loses 392 cylinders when used with DOS
with no translation.  I had to get a RLL controller that supports trans-
lation to work successfully (Disk Manager was unreliable in my experience).
Now I am using 386bsd with all translation turned off.

Bruce Peterson -- peterson@plains.nodak.edu