On 26 September 2017 at 20:53, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
... as usual, lots of high-quality info. Can't disagree with any of it. > There were several additional programs, that were sometimes needed, such as > if you wanted to have a partition larger than 32MB on DOS 3.30 or earlier > (MS-DOS 3.31 was first to accept larger partitions). Until this bit! Vanilla PC-DOS and MS-DOS didn't get past 3.3, TTBOMK. The first DOS I saw that could handle >32MB partitions was Compaq DOS 3.31 -- they tweaked it slightly. It didn't help me inasmuch as at the time, the main use for such "huge" disks was in fileservers -- and my company used 3Com 3+Share, a weird MS-DOS based fileserver with internal multitasking. It was _very_ picky about what additional DOS utilities it would work with. For larger hard disks, the only supported tool was something from Golden Bow Systems, later known for their Vopt disk-defragger. I tried with Compaq DOS 3.31 -- it died messily, as I recall. I also tried a special memory managed for 80286 PS/2s which could turn the 384 kB of XMS into EMS, which 3+Share could use for a disk cache. Yeah, that crashed a customer's live fileserver, corrupting thousands of files. And I did it, so I had to restore all the files they'd edited, one by one, from backups. On floppy diskette. And for the hundred-odd they'd edited since the last backup, undelete them, one by one. Days of work. It was the only disciplinary measure I got, as it was unpaid for the client and immensely tedious (and humiliating) for me. One customer had a Model 80 (a 386) machine with a 330MB hard disk, but wouldn't spring for Golden Bow's disk manager. It had drives C:, D:, E:, F:, G:, H:, I:, J:, K: and L:. Muggins here had to arrange a pattern of disk shares to try and usefully employ all that space. I did manual hashing of user's home directories for some of it. So, anyway, yes, circa 1989, DOS supported disk partition sizes were a subject of intense professional interest for me, and really, seriously, the only 3.x era MS-DOS family OS I ever saw with >32MB support was Compaq's. It ran fine on any machine. I used it on several. I may still have a copy somewhere. That employer only sold IBM and Compaq kit, and being that the UK was poorer back then, mostly I only saw those and other cheaper clone PCs. We didn't get to see some of the other States-side premium ranges, or *I* didn't, until later, in the early-to-mid 1990s. So other vendors may have had larger-disk-partition hacks, too. I recall reading of some -- Wikipedia claims Commodore, Leading Edge, AST, NEC, AT&T, Tandy, Sperry & Unisys all fiddled with FAT formats. Golden Bow's _didn't_ work with MS-DOS 4 and later, which had built-in support for larger partitions. Compaq DOS did -- I think MS, or rather IBM, picked up Compaq's schema and used it. Later it was named FAT16B or BigDOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Logical_sectored_FAT > And, you needed an overlay, such as ONTRACK, to use a drive larger than > 504MB. > Also, if you had a drive whose geometry was too incompatible with your > computer - not all CMOS/SETUPs had a user-defined drive parameters option. Oh my yes -- that was a whole 'nother world of pain. Even in the late 1990s, I was occasionally dealing with this. I incrementally expanded a friend's cheapo Dell Pentium-133 PC for him. 64 MB RAM, IDT WinChip CPU upgrade, bigger hard disk. The original drive was a 120MB or so. The BIOS couldn't handle drives over 512MB. (No Logical Block Addressing.) So I installed OnTrack Disk Manager, moved his Win95B install to the new drive, converted it to FAT32 with PartitionMagic, hooked up his old drive as a slave, made it drive D:, and secured it in place with duct tape and cable ties. Years later he handed it on to his dad. Later, his dad asked a friend to look at the machine for him. Word was passed back to dad, to my mate, and to me: "Blimey. Whoever your son's mate was who upgraded this PC for him, he did an amazing job. I've never seen such an old PC tricked out as much as this, and it's great workmanship." I remain inordinately pleased by that, some 20y later... -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053
