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MS-DOS 6 Limitation of Total Hard Drive Size.

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First post, by Malik

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I've read that MS-DOS 6.x can only recognize a Hard Drive upto 8GB (7.84GB) in size, in total. It means that I can only get 7.84GB out of my, say, 40GB HDD, and that too only in 2GB chunks, right?

In two of my trials (one a Socket 7 with Award Bios 4.51G, and another in a PIII system), I can only squeeze out 5GB from the total 40GB HDD space (2+2+1 GB). What gives?

Partition Magic 8.0 (Dos executable) can "see" every inch of it, and I can partition manually few 2GB FAT16 chunks but MS-DOS can't see more than the first 3 partitions. Fdisk also reports no more free spaces, after deleting all the other FAT16 after number 3.

EDIT : Bios recognizes the Hard Drive properly in both systems. Tried with other large drives too.

Anyone has similar experience?

Thanks.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 1 of 1, by Malik

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Got it. Strange but I've managed to harvest all the space (7.84GB) for Dos out of the 40GB HDD : It seems I was partitioning the slave drive, while the master is still present. I've turned off the the primary master to NONE in bios but the problem appeared inspite of that.
Then I disconnected the power supply to the primary master drive, so that the whole system will think there's only one drive installed and proceeded to re-partition the primary slave.
I don't know how this is connected to this problem, but managed to solve it. Just posted this in case anyone has any similar or even remotely similar problem.
Strange. 😁

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

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