#Dos disk size limit Pc

The Tracks are usually referred to as Cylinders because they can be looked at as a Cylinder extending down through the multiple platters. Each disk surface is divided up into circular concentric areas called tracks and each track is divided into a number of sectors.

As Hard Disk Drives use multiple platters, there are multiple read/write heads inside the Drive.

#Dos disk size limit Pc

The limits imposed by the Hard Disk Drive InterfaceДЄs this limit was imposed by the history of the PC Computer, we will start with the ST506 Interface, that was used in the XT and early AT type Computers.

The BIOS service routines (in particular, Int 13 routine).

BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output Services.ДЄ good way to look at the disk size limitations is to look at the various limitations imposed by layers in the system.Дisk access involves four layers, data must travel through all four layers on its way between the DISK and you. The BIOS is a series of routines, stored in a ROM, that test, configure and boot up your computer and provide services to DOS and application software. This is really only a theoretical limit and in practice a limit of 528 MBytes was imposed by the original BIOS. The only problem is the 16 bit FAT used by DOS and older Windows Operating Systems, lowers this limit to 2.1 GByte. This limitation was overcome in later DOS versions and DOS 6.22 can theoretically address a Hard Disk Drive of up to two tera-bytes (two trillion bytes). A Drive larger than 32 MByte had to be split into sections and no section could be larger than 32 MByte. The worst limit involved Hard Disk Drives larger than 32 MByte.

Hard Disk Drive size limits Phil Storrs PC Hardware Book Historical Hard Disk Drive capacity limitsДOS versions up to and including DOS 3.3 imposed very restrictive limits on Hard Disk Drive Interfaces.