Re: off topic: enhanced DOS ?

["M.W. Poirier" poirmw@xxxxxxxx]

 I'm in the market for a new system which would have a 80G hard
 drive. I'd like to run Windows 97, second edition, on it, and
 DOS 2000, which I understand is the latest version. My goal
 is to place DOS 2000 in one partition and Windows 98 in another.
 Does what you say below also apply to the above operating systems?

 M.W. Poirier

----
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, J. R. Fox wrote:

> 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
>
>