If your talking about a hard drive, just partition it. Although I thought it could handle up to 2gb...

I can't. FDisk only sees the first 504 Mb.

Then it's a BIOS/controller limitation.

DosFreak wrote:

Then it's a BIOS/controller limitation.

Are you sure? I mean BIOS detects the full disk (autodetect with c/h/s values... chs translated i presume). Im pretty sure the limitation is in DOS version X.XX < 7.0 only supporting 6 bit cylinder values? As long as the BIOS supports CHS translation (or Extended CHS) it should handle up to ~ 8 Gb. Or am I completely off the track here? 😀

I have a similar issue on my 486. The bios sees an 8gb drive correctly, and PC DOS 5.02 is running on a 2GB partition, and seems to see all of that.

However, fdisk says the drive is 504mb, though it's let me create another partition of 376mb. I formatted it and yes, it's only 376mb. It's like fdisk picked up the fact that the drive was 25% used, but then only let me create a partition equal to 75% of what it thought there had been in the first place.

[Guess I must have used Win95 or something to set up the 2GB partition.]

Back when I had boxes with real DOS, FDisk from DOS 6.x had no problems with up to 2 GB partitions.

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/har … ze_barriers.htm

'Nuff said.

Thanks! Excellent article. Wish I had found that one years ago 😀