Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Peter 'Shaggy' Haywood Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: MSDOS before cyl 1024 Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:40:24 +1100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 50 Message-ID: <8a99aj-el1.ln1@jefferson.foo> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Injection-Info: reader01.eternal-september.org; posting-host="569b9ecfc95484b9bfee0e722dc66ab4"; logging-data="1270694"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19CsbfigD6acBb+xiAzqxc08Usjn0fo/1U=" User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:NwpqQ1xTZDp0jXE0czoSPoeWwvA= Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:36834 Groovy hepcat vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com was jivin' in comp.os.linux.misc on Mon, 23 Jan 2023 07:13 am. It's a cool scene! Dig it. > So I can put an MSDOS 6.22 multiboot Gparted/Grub partition anywhere? Not if your machine doesn't support LBA mode. In that case your boot loader and its files must be entirely within the first 1023 cylinders. Your boot loader must be accessible to the BIOS. But if it does support LBA, then yes, you can put your boot partition wherever you want[1]. > Should I expand te MBR and put it there? Huh? I'm afraid that doesn't make sense. The MBR (Master Boot Record) is the first sector on the drive. It is 512 bytes long[2], and contains the boot loader and partition table (assuming you're using the DOS partitioning scheme, which is a pretty good assumption). You can't expand it. > I assume I can't revive the Win7 I smashed so am going to put XP like > I did in 2010-14. I don't know why you'd want to run Losedows[3] 7 (or XP for that matter), but to each his own! :) [1] Well, even with LBA mode DOS itself has a 32 bit LBA limit. This means you have a limit of 4,294,967,296 sectors, for a grand total of 2TB. A DOS partition table has this limit, even if it's being used by another operating system. So, if you have a drive greater than that, you only get access to the first 2TB of it. There are other partitioning schemes that support larger drives (eg. GPT), but DOS doesn't support them. [2] Many hard drives these days actually have physical sectors greater than the traditional 512 bytes, but a PC is so geared to using 512 byte sectors that modern drives usually use a *logical* sector size of 512 bytes, so it appears to the system they have 512 byte sectors. [3] Microstuffed Losedows: a barely-operating system with which I will never associate the word "win". -- ----- Dig the NEW and IMPROVED news sig!! ----- -------------- Shaggy was here! --------------- Ain't I'm a dawg!!