Hi, On Sat, Jul 22, 2023 at 2:44 AM John Vella via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Thanks for the quick reply, Ralf. I have a work around, which did the trick. > I just created four partitions, each less than 32gb on the stick, and freedos > is happy with that.
Assuming your FreeDOS kernel has FAT32 compiled in (which most do, omitting it only saves like 2 kb of file size of KERNEL.SYS), it should be fine. I still use my old Dell laptop from 2010 to boot FreeDOS on a (128 GB, FAT32) USB jump drive made by RUFUS. I don't need any third-party USB drivers because the BIOS treats it as a hard disk (but, of course, you can't swap USB sticks, you have to reboot if you want to use a different one). (... more comments below ...) > On Sat, 22 Jul 2023, 03:23 Ralf Quint via Freedos-user, > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> On 7/21/2023 2:01 PM, John Vella via Freedos-user wrote: >> > >> I had never had the need to use such large partitions with (any) DOS, >> and don't use it for anything else, as it is limited to 4GB file size too. The alleged 4 GB file size doesn't work on some OSes (FreeDOS, Windows NT?), only on old Win9x. So you're only guaranteed 2 GB individual file sizes, universally. You'd need DJGPP 2.04 or 2.05 just to (maybe) handle it. Even then, last I checked, they hardcoded a check for "version 7 DOS" before enabling FAT32 support (e.g. du or df). My old 4 GB FreeDOS partition filled up pretty quickly. I was using at least 1 GB for DJGPP stuff (mostly backup .ZIPs). I would not recommend using FAT16 for anything above (roughly) 510 MB. Use FAT32 instead (if possible, which is well-supported by most DOSes, not counting ancient MS-DOS 6.22 and DR-DOS 7.03). >> Theoretically, FAT32 could handle up to 2TB in partition size, while >> newer Windows (and some other OS) limit it to 32GB. I believe the Windows limitation was in "creating" FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB because MS found that it was otherwise too slow under real-mode MS-DOS 7. Vista (and newer Windows) won't even boot from FAT anymore (too slow, security issues). FYI, Windows 11 is 64-bit host only nowadays and supposedly takes up 25 GB of space. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
