Re: Off topic Enchanced DOS

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

John wrote, "one can put more than one interpretation on 'boot to DOS'.
If the system's set up to boot a previous version of Dos which can't
handle fat32/disks over 2Gb, then the whole of the disk will be
unreadable to it." Too true. What I should have said was "boot to the DOS
you're just installed (viz. MDSOS 9.x)"; that is, this was a procedure to
use Microsludge's DOS without being stuck with Windows. MS DOS
pre-Windows95 could only handle 2 G of hard drive space; if your drive
was larger, it had to be partitioned into as many 2G partitions as
needed. 95A used a kludge called VFAT that enables long file names but
was limited to 2G partitions. "FAT32 is an enhancement of the FAT file
system itself. ...[It] is implemented by the FDISK program before the
Winbdows GUI is even loaded." (Scott Mueller, Upgrading and Repairing
PCs, 23th ed., p1334). The same source say FAT32 can handle drives
up to 2 Terabytes. And one final point: FAT32 is MORE, not less
economical of space than FAT16:
Volume Size	FAT16 Cluster Size	FAT32 Cluster Size
16-128 Mb		2K		.5 K
128-256 Mb	4K		.5 K (to 260 Mb vol)
256-512 Mb	8K		4K (to 8G vol
512-1024 Mb	16K
1024-2048 Mb	32K
6G-16G		N/A		8K
16G-32G		N/A		16K
32G-2T		N/A		32K

	But one would not have to run Windows even once. Now that I think it
through more clearly, one probably wouldn't even need to install it. Run
FDISK and FORMAT /s from the startup floppy, then run EXTRACT from the CD
to get the files from \Command onto one's hard drive
	It also occurs to me that I haven't really proved that Novell DOS cannot
read drives larger than 2 G. It cannot read FAT32 drives, but I didn't
try it on a BLANK over 2G drive. I'm not going to wipe a drive just for
that, but at some point I should be repartitioning and reformatting a 15
G drive, and will try to remember to try Novell on that first.
Patrica