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Ranish Partition Manager revived (Announce)

posted by tom Homepage, Germany (West), 17.11.2022, 16:22
(edited by tom on 17.11.2022, 18:03)

> > 100% agree. However, even if DOS is patched to support GPT, the raw
> > partition limit will still be 2048 GiB, correct? No way around that
> limit,
> > even with 4k sector-support, is there? And, further, the filesize limit
> > shall always remain at 4096 MiB (or even 2048 MiB)?
>
> Well I do not have insight into the FreeDOS Kernel, but if it could be
> patched on a source level to support GPT partitions natively
which has already been done ;)

now limits are:

a MBR disk can have at most 2^32 sectors; with 512 byte sectors this gives you 2TB. with 4k native disks (which FreeDOS does not support) you could have 8TB disks, which is probably the trick that some external disk USB enclosers play when they present 512e disks as 4k sectors to the outside world.

a FAT32 partition on a GPT disk can also not be larger than 2^32 sectors, but you can have several of them, even beyond sector 2^32. the amount of work required in the FreeDOS kernel is limited; basically all work is done on the partition level, and would only require the addition of the disk offset in the last few instructions before calling INT13.

of course, disk caching software that doesn't expect 48-bit offsets would be a serious problem ;)

a single file can't be larger than 2^32=4GB byte on FreeDOS/MSDOS file systems

edited to add: not to "can also not be larger than" and "on FreeDOS/MSDOS file systems"

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