Re: off topic: enhanced DOS ?

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Russ Urquhart wrote:

> I thought i had read someplace that Fat-16 meant that your hard drive,
> as recognized by your computer, would top out somewhere around 800Mb?
> the reason i say this is that, from the info i read, was led to believe
> that once you got to the gig sizes you must be running a fat-32 aware
> OS?

Nowadays, it is rather difficult to find a hard drive that is less than 18G.,
with
36+ being more common (Win versions from 98 on, and their app.s, are quite
profligate in their use of H/D space), and you can readily find them going
out
to 180G. in size. So, you don't really have that much of a choice anymore.

Your understanding, as stated above, is incorrect. You can have a bunch of
different partition types (including the EXT Linux type) on the same hard
drive,
but some care in planning their layout is required, for decent results. So
far as
I'm aware, real DOS only understood FAT-16, though this seems to have been
amended slightly for some late version(s) of DOS-7. A major limitation of
DOS
was that it could only see out a distance of 8 G. from the beginning of the
drive.
Ergo, on a multi-OS setup like mine -- with hard drives of 9 & 18G size -- I
had
to put DOS as one of the Primary partition C drives on H/D #1, with all DOS
app.s
like Xy in partitions nearby, and place the latter day 32-bit OSes, which
have their
own partition types, later on the drive; anything that I need DOS to be able
to see
has to go either within the first 8G of H/D #1 (and we're talking FAT-16
partitions
here -- the lowest common denominator as it were -- because DOS can't
*normally*
see into the NTFS or HPFS partitions anyway), or similarly early on H/D #2,
also
limited to those partitions that are FAT-16.

The above is significant because I am going to assemble a system that will
have a
73 G hard drive. Also, the version of Drive Image I use is DOS-based, and
has to be
able to write its image files to a FAT-16 partition that it can see. Ergo,
that also has
to be within the first 8G boundary. If there was some "extended" DOS
floating
around that could see this whole drive, regardless, or even most of it, I
would like
to buy a copy.

Most people today will readily accept the proposition that DOS is obsolete,
and has
no further value. I disagree. It is really more of a machine control
program than a
true OS; it operates at a very low-level, whereas modern 32-bit OSes greatly
limit
direct access to the hardware. There are some critical troubleshooting /
repair or
utility type things that can only or should best take place at a low level.
I would not
want to entrust certain critical things to be run under Windows -- for
example,
Partition Magic, even though Version 6 onward can be run under Windows.

Jordan