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11 hours ago, FranceBB said:
October 2017.
Stats by Verizon.
Just wait FranceBB, once I work out a guide for getting XP onto Coffee Lake and AMD AM4 CPUs this will boost XP to 7.00%
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On 11/4/2017 at 7:29 PM, rloew said:
Size and Drive Letter are already customizeable. You can have as many as you want. To make them permanent, put the commands in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Yes but not many would want to dig around in DOS to setup the Ramdrives. Otherwise why did Microsoft develop Windows? But as an attempt to simply the OS user interface so even kids and grandparents could use the computer instead of CLI geeks.
Aside from that assuming they setup the Ramdrive in DOS preloaded in the Autoexec, if they loaded into 98SE OS and wanted to change the Ramdrive letter from a DOS assigned Z: to X: would this work while within 98SE OS or would exiting to real 98SE DOS from 98SE OS work or would a warm reboot be required after modifying the autoexec be done first?
I would assume you need to do a warm reboot since the OS loading has either dirtied or locked the Ramdrives from changing drive letters or capacity.
QuoteHiddem RAMDisks would have no value since they cannot be accessed.
Well if you can make a hidden Ramdisk (not use a drive letter) as the Temp drive location it would be useful in that case as most people won't be digging around there.
You also mentioned you had a drive letter mounter to do any switching so you could switch it to a real drive letter when needed and force another drive out.
QuoteYou already know that Letters beyond Z are not going to happen.
It was wishful thinking maybe you had one more Ace up the sleeve if programmed for 9X/ME.
QuoteYou still did not answer my question about robustness.
Most of the ideas I stated were to make it such but as you said they are not possible.
So if the foundation of ideas can't work the subsequent ones will not matter.
QuoteI did not ask how much people would pay, I asked how much EXTRA people would pay for the GUI Interface over what they would pay for the existing design.
Not sure. I haven't checked your prices vs the current prices for others.
I suppose if yours did cost $20 then a GUI version for $30 would be reasonable to me and possibly others.
Or a combo package of both versions for $40 basically older CLI and newer GUI options for the user.
QuotePSE supports 2TiB so that is not a problem.
Then the price above I think would be fair for most all things equal. What is the capacity limit of the Ramdrive for DOS and for 9X/ME?
QuoteIt is about you. No one else is asking. If you are not a Billionaire, buzz off. 9x runs as well or better than DOS on any Motherboard. The functionality lost is not even available in DOS.
I'm thinking more like 8 figures for your universal product.
Depends on your target audience. With 9X you are restricted and need a compliant 9X/ME based graphics card and drivers. Going to real DOS most older DOS based games should work and native applications or utilities. Now if FreeDOS was used instead possibly the source code could improve DOS hardware compatibility that might open up multiple cores to be utilized. The 98SE USB advantage is allowing a USB sound device to be identified as a Sound Blaster type when used with DOSBOX. There is less work for the user to get a DOS gaming rig going on a modern system in this manner than it would be to install 98SE from scratch on a Coffee Lake system. Now if you're not a frequenter of Vogons you might not know the niche it may fill there for legacy gamers.
But this is the only viable idea I have of making 98SE relevant today on newer machines so it isn't about me. Remember I have older P4s with ISA slots and have made SkyLake work with 98SE but the limitations and the steps to get it to work properly versus the 98SE DOS using 98 system files and USB 2.0 support would simplify a lot of the problems. Most standard 9X/ME applications can run properly in XP so direct 9X/ME apps really are now pointless to most consumers.
However your background programming expertise is mainly in DOS and an understanding of 9X/ME so this is something I would think you'd be capable of doing rather easily. We all wish we were billionaires but then we wouldn't be working anymore. Like you said there is no free lunch so if you want food on the table you must make something that brings in the dough like your patches. Just eyeballing the 98SE tests I've done on socket 1151/AM4 motherboards the pool of people trying to get these to work on these modern systems is less than I would have suspected. Even recent attempts by others seem to have failed where I was successful and not many probably use my technique either.
DOS itself is rather simplistic and easier to get working even on a Coffee Lake system. There is also no AHCI driver issue to deal with or any potential 9X/ME based conflicts that come up plaguing the system. Otherwise I'm out of any other ideas that you can sink your teeth into of value. I see no other branch to prolong 98SE's usefulness on modern systems and that's just being honest.
So it comes down to a FREEDOS modification to support multicores and being able to run 98SE programs at the command line. 98SE USB detection of devices (sound and game controller) in 98SE DOS the system is running. Two other useful programs MUNT and DOSBOX that would definitely be 9X/ME programs if it could be run at the 98SE Real DOS command line would make 98SE relevant on modern systems. Otherwise I would say the death coffin is pretty much closed for 9X/ME relevance which is regrettable.
QuoteI use 8GB for my Boot Partition. I do not have a lot of Applications. I have 6TB of Data Partitions.
I need the FAT16 for the backward compatibility of DOS programs in case it dislikes FAT32 partitions.
QuoteNo improvement. Translation involved rescaling the Address and Length Arguments of a Request. The Data Transfer is the same. Only misalignments cause problems because extra transfers are needed.
Sounds like SSDs going forward for larger capacities would be a better solution to avoid these misalignments. The drives do take a beating and slow down reusing deleted space.
QuoteThere is only one Adapter. The USB to SATA Adapter.
The USB Bus is 4K in this case. The SATA Bus is 512B.
Are all the USB to SATA adapters you have 4K USB Bus and 512B SATA Bus including the two USB docks you previously mentioned?
What current > 2.2TB drive capacities do you have now aside from the recent 6TB 4Kn drive?
Does your SATA to USB adapter allow the 6TB 4Kn drive to recognize the entire drive as one large MBR NTFS partition uncapped?
QuoteNow I am testing scenario #3 and #4.
Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 4KB - SATA Cable - Sata Controller - OS
Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 4KB - SATA to USB Adapter - USB Cable - USB Port - OS
You might want to see if your new 4Kn drive hooked via SATA directly can interface with XP SP1-3 and the same for USB 2.0 Port to XP SP1-3.
Does both the SATA and the USB method allow booting off this 4Kn drive on the Z87?
QuoteNormally 512.
I did not test XP SP1.
XP SP3 can handle 4KB at the FileSystem level. The USB Stack can also handle 4K. The IDE stack only handles 512B.
So both XP SP3 and the USB Stack handle 4KB at the FS level?
Are you saying XP works with your 4Kn drive directly connected via SATA and also using your SATA to USB on the USB 2.0 ports?
QuoteSince the IDE Stack only handles 512B Logical Sectors. There is not way to adapt a Hard Drive to increase capacity. Your proposed circuit just makes it a 4Kn Drive, undoing the internal translation,
The IDE stack is used if using the IDE controller with IDE devices but what about a BIOS setting SATA in IDE compatibility mode, does this use the IDE stack in XP?
How does this affect computers using the XP AHCI mode which SkyLake and all modern systems are now stuck on?
QuoteA Patch or new Driver for XP is needed.
You are talking about the IDE stack? What files are needed to be patched? This sounds like something that would affect NT/2K since they lack AHCI.
QuoteThe FileSystem in Windows 9x actually supports 2K Sectors but some other parts of the stack don't.
No idea about 2K. XP apparently was designed with 4K support.
So what ends up happening in 9X when using the 2K Sectors or your 4Kn drive?
QuoteThe FileSystem in XP supports 4K. I thought it might fully support 4K after reading the web page I posted. When it failed in my experiments, I reread the page carefully.
Apparently he was using a RAID Driver that did work. The standard ATAPI.SYS does not. I could not get UNIATA to work either.Well you can examine my 8TB post I updated it with the DOS MBR I extracted.
QuoteI said what has been "achieved". 16TiB with USB already can be done. Nothing new here.
I don't think anyone has actually "achieved" and hooked up a true 16TB single drive as MBR in XP just yet.
Now there was this Samsung 16TB 2.5" SSD that cost a fortune that only Bill Gates' son could afford. It's doubtful the owner of something like that would hook it to XP or make the attempt to get it seen as a 16TB MBR drive but most likely GPT on Windows 10.
QuoteMaybe if there was a compelling reason to go to 64K. The gain from going from 512B to 4K is far greater than the gain from going from 4K to 64K.
Assuming the OS's supported 64KB wouldn't the 64KB open up higher capacities just as 4K vs 512B?
I would figure it would be less of a burden when transferring TBs of data per second one day.
QuoteThe fact that paging is 4K and many OSes such as 9x and presumably NT use 4k blocks internally, made 4K an easy choice. 64K would require a major rewrite of every OS FileSystem.
More likely they would add a translation driver to convert it down to 4K, which defeats the purpose of having 64K Logical Sectors in the first place.Yes the 64KB to 4KB translation does slow it down but since it's done on the drive side the OS wouldn't care as long as the OS was happy with the 4KB blocks.
QuoteIncidentally, Microsoft doesn't mention that you cannot boot 4Kn drives on many Motherboards, even if the OS supports it.
There's only one way to find out and test on as many motherboards one has starting with the newest. Since I have more Intel MBs you probably won't have to do that much work weeding out just the AMD ones that work with 4Kn drives. I'll take care of the other half as soon as some cheap 2.5" 4Kn drive pops on the market to do some more testing. But for the Bootable testing even the smallest capacity drive will do down to 128GB to see how they work with older OSs.
Microsoft has been notorious for leaving out exact facts that matter. I'm sure they might as well have stated somewhere DOS will not work on anything past a P4 but here I am using it still today.
QuoteYou must have read my Topic between updates. I added Windows 8 shortly after. I'm adding more updates in a few minutes.
Must have been then.
QuoteYou said you were partitioning Disk since MFM Days. I'm sure you haven't been partitioning 4TB Drives that long.
I started using 4TB as soon as they were available since most of these still supported XP via USB. And since I learned my lesson with 2.5" drives using 512 Bytes AUS I began repartitioning these 4TB drives with 64KB AUS so they perform better. I do have one 4TB 2.5" drive but the performance was real sluggish so I might have to check if this particular drive I had used 512 Bytes or 4KB which was the default.
QuoteYou can connect any size Drive to a SATA Controller and access or even Boot from it in DOS.
It just won't be fully accessible without my Patches.
What do you mean by "fully accessible?" and which named "patches" are you referring?
Currently I can see the 3TB drive fine in 98SE DOS otherwise I couldn't partition it and make it bootable.
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18 hours ago, XPerties said:
I've gone back and forth between virtualdj and serato and will probably stick with serato. I just scored a hp omen $1400 laptop for $400 bucks. Some guy was hard up for cash on facebook marketplace so I took advantage.
Wow that's a good deal and does your "XPerties" name have anything to do with a preference for XP?
If you're using a laptop for the DJing what external sound device will use you for the inputs/output?
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16 hours ago, Tripredacus said:
Sure, people will just have to find something else. That is what I ended up doing when Sony relocated my job to Manilla. They offered $500 to me to pay for expenses to move there!
What were you doing for Sony? I worked for Sega, Sony, MicroProse which Hasbro bought out. Anyone heard of Final Fantasy VII?
Manilla?
Manila as in the Philippines? Stopped by there once and it's brutal.
Sounds like some sort of over the phone customer service support gig.
And $500 to relocate? Did that even cover the airplane ticket?
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11 hours ago, jaclaz said:
Just in case, and for no apparent reason, another Apple link:
http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/osx_snow_leopard_sec_upd.pdf
Just in case for no apparent reason except to show what my sealed Apple Snow Leopard DVD I bought years ago still unopened with the shipping package it came in directly from Apple.
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On 10/28/2017 at 9:47 AM, rloew said:
I am aware of Pirate Bay. I was referring to legal methods.
I never said anything about going to Pirate Bay I believe these are your own assumptions. I said there were torrents which is just a peer2peer way of getting a file. Just like someone uses FTP it's just another file transfer method. If you check the Apple Forums they probably have a "legal" torrent link somewhere if you don't want to go through the Apple Store method. There are a lot of "legal" files that are torrent files so don't mix this up and confuse this with pirate sites. Most unknown sites I wouldn't trust the content.
If you see an official torrent link set up by an Apple Forum moderator I would consider downloading it that way if it's available. If this method no longer exist then yes you need a Mac or as I pointed out buying a cheap copy of an much older Snow Leopard for $20 from Apple.
The newer Apple MAC OS has been free since Mavericks 2013 from what I can recall I remember it was available it to download for free off their main Apple Page then.
I don't get why everyone thinks a "torrent" automatically assume = illegal/copyright infringement. Even you could make a torrent for your 9X demo programs if you wanted people to distribute the 9X demos freely.
It's just a distribution platform before people began abusing it and giving it a bad reputation it now has since you automatically assume torrent mean PB. Just like FTP and HTTP can be used to download free "legal" files.
https://www.mytechlogy.com/IT-blogs/4660/the-origins-of-torrents/#.Wf6iK7hbMz4
Too much negativity has been connected with PB in general I suggest you refrain from mentioning this name as I said before the best way for you is to get an official retail Snow Leopard MAC OS DVD install disc through the Apple Store.
Since you never downloaded MAC OS Mavericks for free off the Apple site when it was available you have to go a round about way to login to the Apple store on a MAC as that was 4 years ago.
I already previously gave you the official Apple purchase link here it is again.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
$20
Once Snow Leopard is installed and working then you create a free Apple Account and login to the Apple Store where you can download the latest MAC OS update for free. You can keep updating to the newest version for free since Apple has made MAC OS free for quite a few years now since Maverick but you apparently missed the earlier boat.
Latest version info:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/09/macos-high-sierra-now-available-as-a-free-update/
Older version info:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/09/macos-sierra-now-available-as-a-free-update/
2013 version info:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2013/10/23OS-X-Mavericks-Available-Today-Free-from-the-Mac-App-Store/
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
$20
If the Apple store Snow Leopard Retail DVD won't install on your system then maybe buy a cheap used Apple laptop on eBay that meets the OS minimum system requirement.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201475
Then you can go directly to the Mac App Store with it and download the latest free Apple MAC OS update.
QuoteYou are confused. I was looking at 4Kn Internal Drives, not laptop drives or USB
I said that a 4Kn Drive would behave the same. I did not say they could be used with an USB adapter. Since I do not have a 4Kn Drive, I can't test my various USB adapters to see if any work.
I also don't know what USB interface size it would use.No confusion as I know you were looking at "internal" drives. I would go for the laptop 2.5" because you can use a SATA to USB adapter to power it up (no power brick adapter) and lower heat dissipation. And laptop drives can be used internally so what you are looking for are actually internal 4Kn 3.5" SATA drives. These 3.5" drives get so hot I keep them connected bare outside of the chassis.
QuoteI said that a 4Kn Drive would behave the same. I did not say they could be used with an USB adapter. Since I do not have a 4Kn Drive, I can't test my various USB adapters to see if any work.
I usually run a bunch of tests directly to find out if XP can see it. 3.5" drives are more limited in what methods you can hook up while 2.5" size drives you could test standard USB adapters to see what happens which is what I would try out. If I see a 4KB Native 2.5" drive pop up very cheap I might test one out and run them myself.
QuoteI also don't know what USB interface size it would use.
I'm sure you'll find out through testing. Are you talking about the logical sector size the USB would appear to the OS?
QuoteI don't like it either but improper usage leads to confusion. You use TB for both Decimal and Binary based sizes. You even came to an incorrect assumption because of it.
You said:
They are both the same limit, 256TiB or 281TB. There is no cap here. You also abused the roundoff of 18TB to get 288TB.
You are not the only that doesn't follow the standard. Fortunately the context usually is enough to tell the difference, although as you get to higher numbers the discrepancy increases.
There is no confusion the Hard Drive will be 28X TB but the Windows limit states 256TB so if MS meant 28X then according to you they should have used 256TiB or state in full the exact bytes for accuracy and avoid any confusion. I only went with the hard drive manufacturer capacity in decimal but Windows does not declare in Bytes for exactness when they stated 256TB. Microsoft may have decided to drop the binary prefix altogether and assume the values themselves are now Binary rather than Decimal but using the conventional Decimal name. So a KB to them is 1024 Bytes instead of 1000 Bytes. This might cause more confusion so they may need to use the older 28X TB value if they want to make you happy since they didn't use 256TiB but 256TB. The 256TB probably also looked better over 28XTB.
People tend to like these binary looking numbers:
1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024...
But for a user the 28X TB actual limit is a benefit as a 25TB loss would have been painful.
However the Hard drive manufacturer wanted the larger decimal number for advertising/marketing so if they were sell specific 256TB drives that would actually be hurting us in this case. They would most likely skip above 28X TB to 300TB so using one of these drives you would have to separate the extra 19TB of space.
If they followed the GB capacity upgrade path it would be a 320TB drive instead making a 256TB drive most likely max you'd consider buying to keep with the older NTFS compatibility on one partition.
In the past they used 137.4 GB / 128GB Binary
https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=936
Hard drive manufacturers use the TB but based it off of decimal version of 1KB = 1000 Bytes.
In my calculations 18.0TB would be about the correct MAX limit hard drive that could use as much of its space for MBR.
You will not find a 2.2TB drive nor will you find a 17.6TB drive and highly unlikely a 17.0GB drive will pop up so the the 18.0TB drive will be as close a drive capacity that will max it out. Hard drive companies will most likely make a 14GB, 16GB, 18.0TB drive, and a 20.0TB drive.
If you want to avoid confusion using the binary form you fully adopted then I suggest you go with the full length binary name rather than the abbreviated form which adds to the confusion more than it helps. Spelling it out entirely MeBiBytes or TeBiBytes would be more clear and allow people to make sense of what you are talking about if they needed to look it up.
Most people if you asked them in person how many GiBs or TiBs they have will look at you funny. Now if you wrote MiBs some might think you were talking about Men In Black. Now if you say how may Gigs or Ters is your drive they might get your meaning.
But the war of decimal vs binary went to battle in the court system and who won?
https://web.archive.org/web/20071016171124/http://wdc.com/settlement/docs/complaint.htm
From this chart it looks like they officialized the binary terminology in 2000 but YottaByte was already in use in 1991.
They missed the boat by 9 years which didn't help and Giga and Tera prefixes were already adopted 40 years earlier so I find it unlikely an easy transition any time soon.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/gigabyte-decimal-vs-binary/
QuoteThey are both the same limit, 256TiB or 281TB. There is no cap here. You also abused the round off of 18TB to get 288TB.
I'm basing if off the 18TB x 16 drives to reach the limit. I don't think they will skip 12.0GB right to 20GB. I see a 2GB increase in capacity leap increment happening.
Your 281TB or my 288TB overestimate is the Hard Drive manufacturer's version of actual HD decimal capacity since they would use the decimal bytes instead of binary bytes. Examining the conversion 17.592TB = 16 TiB approximately.
A true 256TiB hard drive = 281.47497671066 TB approximately.
256TB is the Windows NTFS stated limit as I explained before so if they really meant 256TiB they didn't declare it in binary form or spell it out in bytes for no possible confusion so I found what might be the exact NTFS Bytes limit.
281,474,976,654,120 Bytes using 65536 Bytes cluster size
Even something written with an exponent would be clearer. But I didn't start the capacity terminology but stuck to what was maintained in the early 80s when PCs became popular and mainstream and has been sustained even till today as being more dominant. Whether you or someone in the past could have brought up the 1000 Bytes vs 1024 Bytes 2.4% differential argument for major adoption could or would they have won and made everyone change the naming scheme before it was too late is uncertain.
I think because these base 10 prefixes were pretty common maybe this is the reason why we are where we are now stuck with it. I still have my binary byte memory counts memorized seeing it so much back in the day but I would never think 1000 = 1KB when discussing computers. So I'm not a hater of binary but most people like decimal form because it's more relatable.
But trying to convert everyone or even 95%+ that already have been using an existing standard to use another with much lower acceptance except some geek heads would be like making everyone here that speaks English speak French overnight. There's going to be a lot of resentment and a lack of adoption even if it is considered more accurate and even kilometers would seem more precise than miles.
Curiously I wonder how Americans would take converting speed limit signs from MPH to KPH all over the US all of a sudden even though the US borders Canada it still hasn't happened. I think it would cause a lot of chaos.
The 5 1/4" 360KB disk had 362,496 Bytes from my memory. This converts to a 354KiB Floppy Disk. So even the 360KB disk could have been called the 362KB disk or the 354KB disk but certainly 360KB probably sounded the best. The 360 Degrees in a circle probably helped.
If we went all binary in the past I guess a 1.44MB floppy disk is now downgraded to a 1.416 MiB Floppy Disk.
Neither 354 KiB or 1.416 or 1.41 MiB Floppy would seem flattering to say today.
QuoteYou are not the only that doesn't follow the standard. Fortunately the context usually is enough to tell the difference, although as you get to higher numbers the discrepancy increases.
I agree I'm not the only one but the standard that existed and I followed and even during 1980-2000 there was no perceivable resistance or adoption of the binary standard. Following a new standard ultimately adds to the confusion.
I'm sure partly can be blamed on Hard drive manufacturers and the original Floppy drives started the same pattern of non binary labeling of capacities.
One positive thing that may resolve this issue is after YottaBytes there hasn't been an official set name for beyond that capacity although some favorable possibilities only. This might be a good time to switch from YB to a newer Binary name that can be finally be agreed upon by the computer industry and adding the extra XBB to designate Binary Bytes to force the new standard which would be more convenient to adopt over the former. When YottaBytes is reached it becomes significant enough a figure of 20%+ difference with YoBiByte that it will probably happen some time around then.
The TeraByte vs TeBiByte difference was 10% so that would have been a better stage to transition more easily but that time is gone.
Something like 1.2 YottaByte = 1.0 XBB where the conversion is mathematically easy to translate and just continue on this Binary standard.
Then there will be a YB to XBB crossover usage similar to how KB and MB were used so often.
Eventually people will be using large XBB drives like we use TB drives today and the older Bytes usage will probably be forgotten since they are so tiny no one even uses or cares anymore except some relic programmers.
QuoteThe maximum Cluster size max increase with larger Sectors, increasing this limit. This works with FAT16 and FAT32.
How large can the Sectors for NTFS be increased?
QuoteScenario #1 requires GPT since it needs 64 Bits.
It proves the concept even if it doesn't cover all drives.If I wrote a GPT Loader, it would work with External Drives in DOS and Windows 9x.
But according to this Intel says GPT was supported on Vista 32-Bit. Are you saying it requires a 64-Bit CPU to run this 32-Bit OS with GPT?
I actually ran Vista 32-Bit on an old Pentium-M laptop.
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/gpt_white_paper_1_1.pdf
QuoteIf I wrote a GPT Loader, it would work with External Drives in DOS and Windows 9x.
Unfortunate news that NT/2K/XP won't work with GPT external drives.
QuoteI'm not referring to PetaByte drives. I'm referring to your suggestion of super large Sectors. to support MBR.
We'll see how long MBR will survive. Perhaps I will end up transitioning to GPT at 32TB+. The current memory limitations on XP 32-Bit might be overwhelmed for every day "future internet" usage requiring a jump to XP Pro 64-Bit or later and I'm open to that possibility if I've exhausted all other methods.
QuoteIf it is 512 Byte then the MBR limit is 2TiB. If it is 4K then the MBR limit is 16TiB. If you want larger, you would probably have to order custom firmware and write a new set of drivers.
When the time comes 18TB might be within reach in 5 years or less and depending on the prices of drives as storage capacity increases and their monetary values continue to plummet.
QuoteI'm referring to the current NTFS. A future version that exceeds 256TiB on it's own would not be compatible..
This probably would make eXFAT a better candidate for XP and already in existence since 2006 making it a better workaround if exFAT could support > than the current NTFS 256 TBB / 281 TB limit.
QuoteMy first hard Drive was 12MB.
You mean your 11.444 MiB / Mebibyte hard disk drive.
The first hard drive I used was a 5MB Seagate ST-506 MFM full height 5.25" so it occupied one large rectangle slot so that left the other slot for a large full height 5.25" floppy drive or later dual half height 5.25" 360 drives when the technology improved. I still remember the red blinking light on those some drives also used green. I kind of miss seeing those drives blinking on their own.
Later was a ST-412 10MB MFM also a full height hog. There were ways to cheat and get 50% more space with RLL controllers.
Since these hard drives really got filled up fast copying floppies to them their only redeeming quality was not needing to fiddle with floppy disks to boot DOS and a faster boot time. The loud obnoxious noise and a tendency to get bad sectors or fail completely were its downfall.
Some nice PCs could interface with the controller and it would show the hard drive and floppy drive info on the front display panel. It made computers more interesting then.
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Quote
JFYI, and to be as picky as you seemingly are:
I'm the picky one? LOL. This is the computer standard I grew up with in the USA and especially during the golden age of computers.
Unless in your country they started labeling everything in Kilo Binary Bytes from the start?
Did all your hard drive manufacturer boxes show 120GiB, 100GiB, 80GiB, 60GiB, 40GiB, 20GiB?
or did they show 120GB, 100GB, 80GB, 60GB, 40GB, 20GB like in the USA?
8 hours ago, jaclaz said:The 28-bit "barrier" happens on (2^28-1)*512=137,438,952,960 bytes, i.e. at roughly 137 GB or 137,438,952,960/(1024^3)=128 GiB.
Oh, and before I forget:
I did state (and it was obvious) that the bootsector invoked BOOTMGR, but of course that could be any Vista or later OS or *any* other file renamed to BOOTMGR.
Yes in the USA this is known as the 128 GB / 137.4 GB barrier. The so called Kilo Binary Bytes naming never took off in the USA that you prefer however this may be different in your country and you are claiming your country always used the KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB unit naming scheme on all their products?
In the USA it is more well known as the 128GB barrier and as far hard drives there is and has never been a 137.4 GB or a 140GB hard drive to fully capitalize on it. This would have given someone roughly 9GB more of usable space which is about 14% then so quite a boost.
There were only three capacities that came close to this barrier before and after.
120GB, 128GB (usually SSDs) and 160GB.
Now I would never tell someone at the time to get a 160GB drive to max out the so called 137.4GB barrier. Sticking to 120/128GB was the smarter thing to do. Stressing the 137.4GB may cause people to take a risk and go for the 160GB drive. Unless you've ever lost 40GB or more of significant data you probably won't understand my point.
8 hours ago, jaclaz said:I see now, according to you it is the same thing to make a serious conceptual error (such as stating that it is not possible to access the MBR through a USB connection and presenting a PBR or VBR - BTW a NTFS one, 16 sectors long - as if it was a MBR, without understanding what they represent) and a - anyway debatable - case of small/CAPITAL letters typo in a measurement unit symbol.
Good to know
.
Please stop making wild accusations about what I said. Just to be clear I never said you couldn't access the MBR off a regular USB device as you know I can make these bootable to 98SE so it's obvious in this case that is false.
I said because this one used a special SATA to USB adapter not a regular SATA to USB adapter and I didn't want to risk damaging 8TB of DATA and I couldn't shut down the machine since I do work on it I would try to find a DOS based MBR program to access it directly connected to the SATA port. Now maybe this came out to you as a "conclusive" no way to access the MBR via a regular SATA to USB adapter.
You do know there is a difference between how the data is interpreted using the special SATA to USA adapter and a regular SATA to USB adapter when it comes to these > 2.2TB drives?
The Windows program I had tried to access the MBR which you were not familiar nor did you volunteer any DOS based equivalent MBR extracting programs in a typical jaclaz manner or show any interest I went and tried using a Windows program I found myself that supposedly claimed to be able to do it and as a first attempt at trying to get some data going on the topic even though there was never any indication my data gathering was fully done and even I would call it still not "complete".
My preliminary work since it is a work in progress and thus the Partition Boot Record or Volume Boot Record was only accessible at the time by default in the way the program was set up for examining the first sector and you neglected to understand the 14 byte width was the default setup on my system so using a new program I cannot predict how the information would be extracted in the same manner instead of the standard 16 byte width. Since there were several options to extract all code and pop it out without any spaces or try to retain the structure of it with the addresses which I felt would be more digestible for people. So it's obvious someone who has done it before would have recognized what they were seeing which is the goal. So any incorrect information could be correctly updated.
Now unlike you the only time I really examined the MBR was on the early 8088 way before your first 486 machine that you used.
I mainly studied copy protected NON-DOS bootable floppy disks probably something you weren't interested in because I got a ton of these unique MBR snowflakes. Hard disk MBRs didn't interest me at all and this was during the MFM days of FAT not NTFS.
Also I didn't see any need to waste time looking at the MBR of my hard drive then. All you had pretty much to use was IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. There was not a multiple OS installation then and DOS was all most people used. Now I could go on about the other NON IBM based computers I have but that probably doesn't interest you. But if it does which ones do you have?
In general no one needs to waste time examining regular MBRs to get their systems running. No problem getting DOS->W10 working on all my systems and no need to study the MBR in detail. As long as you can image your boot partition to recover it when something goes awry that's all the necessary info you need.
It's like someone who drives a car and knows what tires to buy. Studying the MBR would be someone who cares about looking at the tire treads for what kind of wear it accumulated over time. No one cares. They just care their tires are fine and the car drives and continue with their life.
In your case since you tend to dabble more on the Linux side this became more of a necessity which is the mother of invention. However on my side it doesn't add to the experience since Microsoft took care of such headaches quite nicely so no real fiddling is required of the MBR as long as you have the right tools to restore your boot partition or OS image which takes much less time to get back up and running.
I would say your other claim about everyone knowing how to boot a full XP SP3 off USB in SkyLake also is a bit ridiculous. If 99.99% knew how to do this on their modern system today you'd see a surge of XP OS browser usage maybe close to 25%.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
You also forget I didn't shift from FAT32 to NTFS till probably late 2012-13 when large HD videos became too burdensome when exceeding over thirty minutes in recording length since the file sizes would run into the 4GB limit quite easily. Mainly used to store HD videos and not bootable drives.
There is really only one purpose of this Drive Discussion I opened here and it's to find a way to either replicate the special SATA to USB connector so it uses regular USB power rather than a brick. If this was a standard regular < 2.2TB drive or a GPT drive there would absolutely be no interest to me to gather the info. However since this is still in the data gathering phase nothing is set in stone yet so any incorrect data can be fixed if spotted.
Any information gathering I am doing is for the MSFN community not for you alone. I know you admittedly stated to me that the largest drive you have is only 500GB which seems a bit outdated so you may have a bias towards larger capacity drives of 8TB and up. You don't specify what computer have so I have guess it's probably a socket 1366 era or at best Ivy Bridge but with 500GB as the largest drive it's questionable. Now I don't know if you just can't afford larger capacities or simply don't need to upgrade your system as you are not taxing it much with what you use it for. So if you have no interest in the actual data gathering I'm doing or getting larger capacity drives working in 2K/XP I don't see why you even care about arguing with me here. But if you do have a positive interest your mannerisms do not invoke it.
Now given IF maybe you do have actual interest and since you seem to think you know it all and are into puzzles and profess to be an expert on things concerning MBR then you should be able to correctly answer these questions without faltering.
Setup 1:
Can the 3TB hard drive be accessed and then made bootable to 98SE DOS using this special SATA to USB adapter attached to the USB port (not a regular SATA to USB) adapter during computer BIOS boot up set for USB bootable device priority?
Setup 2:
When the 3TB hard drive is directly connected to the SATA controller and under 98SE DOS
using FDISK to partition the Primary Partition as FAT16 2047MB
then an Extended Partition as FAT32 size of 14311 MB
with the Logical drives to fully use up the space made in this Extended Partition as (4GB, 4GB, 4GB, 2GB)
Formatting all 5 Partitions in 98SE DOS and Partition 1 made bootable and active.
Now... using the special SATA to USB adapter (not a regular SATA to USB adapter) to hook up the 3TB hard drive to the USB port.
Under Windows XP's Disk Management the exact total capacity for the drive will be 2794.51GB.
You should be able to answer the following.
What will the break down of the partition sizes be shown in XP Disk Management?
In XP can these partitions be accessed correctly as it was created under 98SE DOS?
What will be the size of the "Unallocated" partition space be in XP Disk Management?
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On 11/3/2017 at 5:09 AM, jaclaz said:
Come on
, think a bit before making these kind of incorrect statements .
Of course the MBR is perfectly accessible on a USB disk, otherwise you wouldn't be able to access partition(s) on it (or to re-partition it).
A USB disk drive (like any other mass storage device) exposes a \\.\PhysicalDrive object in any NT base system (i.e. what you see in disk management) and of course ALL sectors of a \\.\PhysicalDrive are accessible.
The sector(s) you posted is NOT the first sector of the external disk drive, it is at offset 63, and it is the PBR or VBR.
Calm down my digital mucker friend... Patience... It takes awhile to get all the data collected in my spare time.
Got about 3 systems I will have to build after the 3TB testing so I can move stuff onto it and free up some spare boot drives which could allow me to do more testing without shutting down my main system.
QuoteThat you (or the software you are using) are incapable of accessing the MBR of that disk is another thing.
You can get a "better" disk editor (such as the Tiny-Hexer I posted a screenshot of) that will be capable of accessing the \\.\PhysicalDrive just fine (and BTW will default to the "correct" 16 byte view), or get any of the tools suggested by the Starman, such as HxD:
First you didn't care when asked the DOS MBR tools to use and now you seem to have an interest...?
The 16 Byte View was condensed by default probably because the program was expecting a larger video resolution which caused the initial truncation effect. But since it's just numbers/letters this shouldn't affect you copying it as the data wasn't altered just how it was presented. There is another output where it spits it all out without any spaces if that interests you more and can be loaded into a MBR analyzer.
I found a DOS method to "properly" and "safely" extract a copy of the MBR a week ago. I've been busy gathering all the different capacity drives I have and analyzing them to see any differences. Though the program I used does have a feature to extract the MBR but it has a somewhat hidden way to get it and since you never used my program then you would not have a clue. I might test your Tiny-Hexer for MBR extracting as well.
Quotehttp://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/BootToolsRefs.htm
More generally, if you could take some time reading the Starman's page on MBR and PBR/VBR's it would surely increase your understanding of the matter and help you avoid making these erroneus statements.
Although I've seen some better sites relating to the real "StarMan" (1984) and MBR research. Yours didn't have what I was looking for at first glance and some other MBR sites did but will check it out StarMan again in more detail if necessary to accomplish a future goal.
However I did spot an erroneous statement.
QuoteWHY?
I mean what particular "news" do you believe it contains?
It is another bootsector, this time FAT16, invoking as well BOOTMGR, and as well with 63 sectors before, 4192865 sectors in size, 512 bytes/sector i.e. roughly slightly less than 2 Gib, with a cluster size of 64 sectors or 32 Kb, nothing particular about it at first sight.
It may not look like much but this is the template that makes DOS -> Windows 10 Bootable off a small partition. At least you recognized some of the characteristics but I thought you also could gleen the possible OS info.
For your analysis you probably would want to use 2 GiB for 2 GiBiBytes since you like that binary form and 32 KB. The large B is for Bytes, the small b is for Bits. 32Kb would imply 32 Kilobits not Kilobytes. So be careful and don't get sloppy there as you've been pretty concise.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/262320-Dont-get-confused-KB-vs-kb
http://www.wu.ece.ufl.edu/links/dataRate/DataMeasurementChart.html
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On 10/25/2017 at 2:43 PM, rloew said:
Since 64-Bit RAM is normally unused, you can create the RAMDisks in DOS and just leave them until needed.
I'm not sure what you mean by robust. They have proven stable under all of the circumstances I know of.
I'm talking about 9X GUI support like other commercial Ramdrives like those in XP. Customizeable drive letter choosing, setting Ramdrive size, and the ability for multiple Ramdrives up to 24 or 23 meaning if C: is taken by your hard drive then D: to Z: can be assigned to use the available > 4GB+ RAM in what manner they see fit.
Rebooting the system will retain the saved settings.
If a user chose to they could have D: to Z: as Ramdrive drives of different capacities as long as it doesn't exceed the available RAM.
Now if you could also create hidden Ramdrives that don't use Drive Letters or extend the Drive Letters beyond Z: C2, D2, ... Z2 pattern so drive letter consumption won't be a limitation.
QuoteHow much extra would you be willing to pay for fluff. How much extra would all of your friends and coworkers be willing to pay for fluff.
It's not about how much extra but how good the interface and features it has so people want it. If your 9X Ramdrive with a true 9X interface was created on par with an XP Ramdrive then a similar pricing to what other XP Commercial Ramdrive exceptional software would be priced if the feature set is identical. Now if there are certain memory limits for 9X where the Ramdrive size is capped then yes you can't charge the same but less assuming you could do 2TB Ramdrive in XP but your 9X version was capped at much less due to an OS limit that can't be broken. Now if you were really serious about doing it I could probably help guide the user interface design and look of it to where I would call it exceptional.
QuoteIt sounds like you want to make Windows 98SE Drivers run without Windows 98SE. That would require containerizing the entire WDM Interface.
Then it would be necessary to interface between the Windows Audio and Networking Interfaces and those used by DOS Audio and Networking.
Keyboard and Mouse are already handled by SMI Emulation. Game Controllers can be handled fairly simply.The Networking Interface doesn't need to be implemented as DOS browsing isn't critical.
Just getting the 98SE USB interface working on 98SE DOS. I would say the USB Audio and maybe the USB game controller are really the ones that need to get targeted.
QuoteSend me a six figure retainer and I will work on it.
You assume this is about me and I am a Multi millionaire or Billionaire like Gates. I'm just giving you ideas on what real 9X users would possibly pay for especially those interested in using 9X DOS for legacy DOS gaming without dealing with the headaches / limits of 9X on post ISA slot modern hardware.
A real 6 figure project would be a DOS->W10 32/64 Bit OS all in one fully software compatible.
QuoteFor a Boot Partition, it is OK. For data, not even close.
Boot Partition 2GB is fine.
OS Partition 16GB for 98SE would be plenty. You create another dedicated partition much larger for Program Files and Document/Data storage. There is no need to constantly bloat your OS partition and 16GB would probably be way more than enough for the main OS files as long as you separate the Program files and other files that can be redirected to another partition which allow it.
QuoteDOS is safest and fastest. I normally use DOS.
True. About a week or so ago I found a suitable MBR reader for my data gathering tests. I had a much older one in the early 80s for Floppy and MFM Hard Drives I used to use but I believe that one stopped working properly way before IDE drives or some newer DOS version it was incompatible with somehow. I think I was using it on DOS 1.1 and 2.0 at the time. The last time I really examined the MBR out of curiosity. It was more about analyzing copy protected NON DOS boot disks.
QuoteI already said 64KB Logical Sectors will NOT improve transfer rates, only that 64KB AUS might.
I was talking about 64KB Physical Sectors on the platter side storage with a direct SATA connector that interfaces as 64KB Logical sectors to the OS. So no conversion would take place. Now adding on top of that the 64KB Cluster size or AUS it will just be icing and of course improve performance.
QuoteNot so. The Adapter converts 4KB to 512B. The Drive converts then 512B back to 4KB which then accesses the appropriate Sectors.
You might be more specific here. The "Adapter" are you talking about the "SATA to USB"?
Which side is the 4KB and which side is the 512 Bytes.
From what I can tell the Bare drive in the USB enclosure is a 4KB platter storage drive but converts to 512 Bytes on the SATA connector end.
These are the two typical scenarios to hook it up:
Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 512 Bytes - SATA Cable - Sata Controller - OS
Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 512 Bytes - SATA to USB Adapter - USB Cable - USB Port - OS
QuoteThe MBR barrier is extended only by having larger Logical Sectors at the OS interface.
Logical Sectors would be 512 Bytes at the XP OS Interface?
Now you say larger Logical Sectors at the OS interface so how large Logical Sectors can XP SP1 handle?
QuoteThe Physical Sector size of the Hard Drive, or the Logical Sector Size between the USB Adapter and the SATA Port on the Hard Drive are irrelevant.
Non modification of the OS and using true hardware is the objective of increasing the MBR capacity so it works on any system without modification. Using a DDO or emulator adds another level of patching similar to just why not switch to GPT entirely if you're going that route. There's a reason why using 18.0TB on XP via a USB cable is an advantage without any kind of OS modification. Nothing needs to be done on the destination system at all. As long as they are running XP SP1 or higher OS this drive can be automatically detected.
Now whatever they did in the actual SATA to USB adapter if they could incorporate that into the Hard drive circuit board then you could access the total capacity of the drive natively on the SATA controller or using a "regular" SATA to USB adapter. I'm not certain why they chose to not do that and used a special adapter method.
QuoteThe OS has to understand the Sector size presented to it's FileSystem. Unmodified DOS and Windowx 9x is limited to 512 Bytes.
This should include 2K and XP 32-Bit?
Quote, XP and above appear to be limited to 4K.
My modified DOS supports up to 32K and my modified Windows 9x supports up to 4K. These determine the MBR limits, nothing else.
What do you mean here by limited to 4K? Now here you are saying XP can understand 4KB Sector size and a regular 4KB native SATA drive will work with XP without any adapter?
QuoteAll this nonsense about adapter boards and 64K will not increase the capacity of any OS beyond which has already been achieved.
No one is going to rewrite the FileSystems just to support 64K when it is far easier to support EMBR or GPT.
Maybe when Windows 14 comes out, they might add it, but don't count on ever getting an upgrade for Windows 12 or earlier.
The adapter boards already breaks the 2.2TB MBR standard limit. So I would not say 18.0TB MBR max on XP is something to laugh at.
Rewriting the File Systems probably won't happen unless the technology is present first which is my point. If 64KB drives were made as the first jump from 512 Byte drives then i would say yes Windows 8 probably would have supported 64KB now just like it currently supports 4KB drives.
The reason 4KB drives aren't supported on XP is because they didn't get these 4KB Native drives out fast enough to consumers so MS would have been forced to created an OS patch just like SP1 was created for the 128GB issue.
If MS and the hard drive manufacturers all agreed to 64KB drives and they released it today trust me there will be a patch coming from MS for Windows 10 for sure since it's still new. Possibly W7 and W8.X would get a back port since W7 is still quite dominant an OS today. If 64KB drives won't be out till 2030 of course it won't happen till way past 2030.
And it looks like you recently acquired a 4KB Native drive so this drive should work fine on Windows 8 without any special patching.
On 10/24/2017 at 3:26 PM, rloew said:Not 4TiB Drives.
Sure I have. I have done both the 4TB and the 8TB drives as I've partitioned and formatted it as one large MBR NTFS partition chunk.
I also did some testing last week and the 3TB drive is bootable to 98SE DOS directly connected to the SATA controller. Though not many will try this ever.
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Quote
The VANTEC NSP-D400S3 and the ByteCC Duplicating Docks use 512 Byte Sectors on their USB Ports regardless of Disk size.
The unit reminds me of a toaster. The way two drives are vertically inserted worries me if it were to tip over. Try 3TB and larger with XP 32-Bit to see if translates and allows the entire drive as MBR.
QuoteThe Hitachi 2TB ST Touros use 4K Sectors. I have not disassembled them.
These are probably the drives that have a soldered USB connection from the looks of the shell. You won't be able to use these internally. The Seagate external drives seem to be the only ones I've seen that still can be extracted with the SATA connectors intact.
11 hours ago, rloew said:Since a MAC is required, I assume that it is not freely redistributable.
A MAC isn't required. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge have done it. You can get Snow Leopard for cheap and get the Hackintosh working. Then login to the Mac Store to download the newer versions for free or if you know someone with a MAC they can download it to a flash drive. Like I said many have made a USB method to simplify the install process.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
QuoteDidn't look. Probably would be too low a capacity to be of interest.
I'm sure they would have 2TB 2.5" drives. These will be USB powered making them portable.
QuoteI'm talking about a 4Kn Drive. It would behave the same as a 512e drive with a 4K translating USB Adapter. There would be no reason why access would stop at 2TiB.
4KB Native drives currently have no USB adapters that I've seen that work with XP. The drive inside the XP compatible USB enclosures use a 4KB Physical -> 512e model.
QuoteThe size of the Drive, 2.5" or 3.5", has nothing to do anything we have been talking about.
Indirectly 2.5" drives also work with the adapter taking up less space.
QuoteHe said nothing about larger sizes than 4K.
Looks like I confused what he wrote but it's also irrelevant now until further tests.
I examined the 3TB drive hooked up directly to the SATA controller and the Sector Size is indeed 512 Bytes.
Identified as BIOS Drive (Int13x 81h)
DOS only sees 782.7GB capacity.
Cylinders: 364801
Heads: 255
Sectors: 63
Sector Size: 512 Bytes
Total Sectors: 1565565872
QuoteYou are confusing TB and TiB.
No offense but there is no naming confusion. I choose or refuse to use the computer naming standard of Kilo Binary Bytes. Also as a purist I would never call a 360KB floppy drive a 360 KiBiByte floppy drive. 360 KiB looks lame. They should have just kept all the Prefixes the same and made it KBB, MBB, GBB, TBB, PBB, EBB, ZBB which would have been accepted more easily as all you are indicating is the extra B is for "Binary".
You're welcome to try and spread the ISO/IEC 80000 standard but I think it's liberal "PC" gone amok. The original already existing standards sound better, but adding an extra letter adds 50% more waste going from 2 to 3 bytes. If they were going to use that then just spell out the prefix or go with the extra B.
Ask anyone which they would rather pronounce, learn, and use?
KILO byte or KiBiByte? You were born saying Kilo. Kibi? What is this the Keebler elve?
MEGA Byte or Mebi Byte? Mega Millions or Mebi Millions? Mega wins.
GIGA Byte or GiBi Byte? GIGA wins. No contest.
TERA Byte or TeBi Byte? Who doesn't love Tera or closely resembling Terra like Earth?
PETA Byte or PeBi Byte? Toss up. PETA stands for you know what so pro pets I'm game. But Pebi? Sounds tiny like a pebble.
EXA Byte or ExBi Byte? Exa looks and sounds better.
ZeTTa Byte or ZeBi Byte? Zetta definitely.
YoTTa Byte or YoBi Byte? --- this one is toss up as Yobi doesn't sound that bad although Yotta Byte sounds like Ya Outta Bite.
And are you going to get the United States to change from Miles to Kilometers next?
Anyone using computers since the 1970s knows what a Bit, Nibble, and Byte is and that 1KB = 1024 Bytes and there is no confusion.
Hard disk manufacturers aren't going to switch and neither are the newest graphics cards.
Any software program I see using it I junk it since it breaks the standard.
Quote64KB and NTFS are limited to 256TiB.
I still stand by my 256TB standard or TeraByte standard.
Even wiki and Microsoft do as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
QuoteLimits
Max. volume size264 clusters − 1 cluster (format);
256 TB − 64 KB (implementation)[3]Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to "technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community."[1] The awarded are people who "actively share their ... technical expertise with the different technology communities related directly or indirectly to Microsoft". An MVP is awarded for contributions over the previous year.
Windows File System Troubleshooting 1st Edition, Kindle Edition, Publication Date: June 26, 2015
Page 22:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ylQwCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&focus=viewport&dq=256tb+ntfs+limit
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn466522(v=ws.11).aspx
QuoteSupport for large volumes. NTFS can support volumes as large as 256 terabytes. Supported volume sizes are affected by the cluster size and the number of clusters. With (232 - 1) clusters (the maximum number of clusters that NTFS supports), the following volume and file sizes are supported.
Cluster size Largest volume Largest file
64 KB (maximum size) 256 TB 256 TB
QuoteParagon did it. This is the reason for using GPT.
That's GPT and not MBR and it's still confined to internal drives and not external drives.
QuoteThere is nothing to mimic. The SSD Memory array is addressed in 512 Byte Blocks via the SATA interface. The addressing Block size is arbitrary so it can be set to anything in firmware.
Still to be tested with 3TB+ SSDs when they get cheap if MBR can exceed 18TB.
QuoteNow you are getting ridiculous.
It's a matter of perspective. 1PB today is what 1TB looked like to us then when we were using 8GB drives. How long did it take for us to get from 8GB to 1TB? Not that long. It's going to happen and we are going to find ways to consume that space and want more.
QuoteIn any case, the NTFS limit probably would increase with Sector size as the maximum Cluster size should increase.
I think the NTFS limit would be 2PiB with 4K Sectors.2PB on NTFS would be tremendous but only if MS updates NTFS to v4.0 to exceed 256TB.
Since 2PB is like the 2TB of today it really seems to be not a lot of space once we get there.
I recall a 1GB SCSI drive seemed to be enormous during the 386 days but who am I to judge what capacity seems ridiculous today.
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On 10/27/2017 at 4:30 AM, rloew said:
Since it is not changing Sector Size, it would not be considered "emulation". There is no reason why it could not report 4aK or 64K.
4aK?
QuoteYou need a MAC to follow the instructions given.
Which step? If you need the MAC OS it is free to all unlike Windows.
. Some people have made it easy to transfer to a USB flash drive simplifying the process.
QuoteI found much better prices.
Good any 2.5" models?
QuoteApparently they do work with XP 32 not XP 64 according to the website I linked earlier.
This I'm not 100% on just yet. I have to try hooking up this 3TB 4KB 512e drive to XP 32-Bit to check if direct access of all 3TB of MBR data still works. My guess is you can't write to the drive in XP 32-Bit to the entire 3TB directly. I think it will still be capped at 2.2TB without the address translation adapter. Now if it turns out I can read / write to the entire 3TB then that would mean any 2.5" 3TB or larger could do the same.
I found some more comments on that website:
QuoteXP 32-bit can work with 512e just fine, minus some possible alignment issues. The problem is the master boot record with its 32-bit address field. 232 = 4 binary billion sectors addressable, right? That’s 2TiB when each logical sector is 512 bytes large. As soon as you boost the sector size to 4096 bytes, the address space grows automatically, to 16TiB. There are always two ways of increasing addressable space:
1.) Increase the address field, e.g. from 32-bit to 64-bitor
2.) increase the smallest addressable atoms’ size, e.g. from 512b to 4k.
And that’s why Windows NT5.1 / XP 32-bit needs 4Kn for making drives >2TiB fully usable.
Because it can only use 32-bit MBR partitions.
Windows NT5.2 / Server 2003 / XP x64 doesn’t have that problem, because it can use 64-bit GPT, at least for data volumes.
So given what is said there I'm not sure if this guy is saying as long as the drive is 512e or 512 Bytes to the OS no matter if the physical sector size is 8KB->64KB it won't make any difference and larger physical sector sizes would give larger and larger reachable MBR capacities without needing to go to GPT.
4KB would get at least 18TB
8KB would boost to 36TB
16KB would boost to 72TB
32KB would boost to 144TB
64KB would boost to 288TB, capped at 256TB Windows NTFS/exFAT limit.
But since Step 1 won't happen with XP 32-Bit that is out of the question but looking at
Step 2 increasing to 8KB->64KB Physical sector size seems to be the only way hard drives can boost MBR capacity limits.
Since we discussed SSDs not having an actual physical sector size then it is possible for SSDs to mimic 128KB and 256KB sector hard drives that show 512 Bytes on the SATA connector end to continue the legacy MBR support on 32-Bit Operating Systems like Windows 2000 and XP.
128KB would give you 576TB
256KB would give you 1152TB breaking the 1 PB barrier.
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6 hours ago, rloew said:
Since SSDs do not have a defined Sector Size they would be 512 Byte Drives not 512e. The "e" means it is emulated.
Yes I know the "e" stood for emulated but if SSDs don't have a defined Sector Size wouldn't they be emulating 512 Bytes? If it can appear as 512 Bytes then there is no reason they can't appear as 4KB or 64KB.
QuoteI'm not interested in MACs. If you want me to run tests, send me one.
MACS are Intel based now so yours probably can be made into a Hackintosh quite easily on the Z87.
QuoteAnything that is accessed through the INT 13 Interface and is not treated as a Floppy Drive ID 0 or 1.
INT 13 ID 0x9F is reserved leaving 0x80-0x9E.
Is UEFI still stuck with this old limit?
QuoteInteresting. A bit pricey and not a brand that I would trust though.
That was one of the cheaper ones available since you hadn't seen a 4KB bare SATA drive. Not a fan of Seagate either as far as reliability back in the day had a bad reputation except some of their recent laptop drives absorbed from Samsung are pretty reliable. Options are limited these days and prices goes up for everyone. SSDs are probably going to be the future so I'm not sure if 4KB drives will actually be mainstream.
QuoteYou might want to stock up.
Why? They don't work with XP nor the adapter. It'll be quite awhile before I switch to 4KB Native drives assuming 512 Bytes and 512e disappear. Those would be the ones to stockpile for legacy support.
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11 hours ago, Tripredacus said:
The default formatting on the forum is messy, you should try using a code box with no syntax highlighting.
Relevant: http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/MSWin41BRinHexEd.htm
Is there a page on all the forum commands / features and how to use them?
How do I get the MSFN links from showing a preview or shorten links to a small clickable object?
Can you create collapsible spoiler windows?
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Quote
The AF Format was designed for efficiency. They still have 512 Byte Sectors at the interface.
SSDs do not have a defined Sector Size except for erase.
SSDs should be 512 Bytes on the SATA connector end as they work on DOS->XP.
Now if 3TB->18TB SSDs will be 512e that would make them useful.
6 hours ago, rloew said:I don't know if jumpers could be extended to 64K. I'm sure proper manipulation of the NTFS Partition can be done to align on 64K Boundaries. I can already do this with FAT32.
I'm not sure about the near future. The improvement over 4K is a lot less than the switch from 512B to 4KB.
No. The ECC is at the Physical level. In either case there would be only one ECC per 64KB. You don't add ECC to the 512 Byte Sectors at the Interface unless you are emulating a "READ LONG" Command.
It might be possible to add translation to that Card because it probably has an EPROM. But you will end up with an ISA to PATA Card which is not very helpful.
SATA Controllers use dedicated hardware with built-in firmware so they cannot be changed. The BIOS may be updateable but that would not help with Windows.
It isn't particularly new. I bought them years ago. I'm not sure if they were pre-formatted. I don't remember what model.
They won't. I don't have a MAC. I haven't experimented much with Linux.
Get it and see if it works.
31 total. This is the limit of INT 13 Drive Numbers.
If the BIOS supports it, DOS supports it. So should Windows.
31 Total MFM drives on an IBM XT now that would be a sight.
I can't find any references to this limit. How did you calculate this?
Did MFM Floppy drives and tape drives count against the 31 Total Drive Limit?
QuoteThat is a SAS Drive. It uses SCSI protocol.
Copied the wrong link. Here is the correct 4KB Native SATA model.
Seagate 2TB 3.5 HDD V.5 (4Kn) 3.5" SATA Model ST2000NM0105
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-2TB-SATA-Model-ST2000NM0105/dp/B01G3S8SGA
Two more higher capacity 4KB Native SATA drive models.
ST4000NM0085
ST6000NM0125
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST6000NM0125-Enterprise-7200RPM-256MB/dp/B01E1XS3W8
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On 10/26/2017 at 12:08 AM, jaclaz said:
Naah.
First physical sector of the disk (or \\.\PhtsicalDrive) is the MBR.
What you posted is NOT the MBR, it is the PBR (and starts on sector 63 of the disk, i.e. on first sector of the volume).
You somehow chose the Volume instead of the \\.\PhysicalDrive in Hex Workshop.
I posted an image of the data with its common interpretation, and from it you can easily see which tools I used.
By convention these data is visualized in 16 byte wide format, not 14.
8TB DOS MBR extraction
"www.msfn.org/board/topic/177176-mbr-gpt-drive-dissection/?do=findComment&comment=1146507"
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2 hours ago, winxpi said:
Submit?!What do you mean?
As in job applications sent in. At least in the US you fill out an application on paper or do it online.
Have you read my private message to you? That might help with the shyness.
You could also try some temp agencies where they a 3rd party company is like the middle man to getting you a job which could be part or full time.
How about interning at a company you are interested in working at?
Usually Non-Paid but at least it gets your foot in the door and maybe they will get to know you well enough underneath that they like you and not base their evaluation of you on the first impression?
As for overqualified I would have to look at the "Letter of application". How do they judge your skills? I would think the C.V. is the the closest equivalent to a résumé here. Yes they could use this against you if they think you are too skilled if they are looking for someone trainable.
Have you ever considered any other fields of interest that may be as enjoyable?
The I.T. field I would think would be quite boring and something in the creative field might interest you. Or doing something I.T. related but at a creative company.
QuoteI attended all of them. It were 59 after the last one that was recently. Maybe 4 of them I decided not to take the job since one of them was more a front desk/receptionist like work. And Im rather shy. These 59 interviews also include 2 jobs were I worked in a call-center and got fired in the first month. I dont count these jobs as IT however because it wasnt IT-specific rather the usual call-center stuff and maybe one time support for a software. But I barely got more experience than the 8 days were we all learned the software and the neccessary background information about the job and has 2 days "Training on the job". I was lucky to get paid for a month. Another time I got fired this year after 5 days and I didnt even get to make a phone call. I always thought getting fired after 8 days and only getting paid that much is the worst, well until that happened with the 5 days. I hate it!
Btw.: I asked for feedback of the last company. I did only find out 2 other guys had more IT skills and also experience in the area the job was placed.
Also I was told I could improve my "body language". SO its like I expected I get worse results than others also because of my body language.
I doubt that people never gave ma chance from day one on, if it was only about loopholes in the resume. And its clear that you cannot have 1-2 years IT hands-on experience if you just graduated. But If your nearly a decade out of education its clear they can expect at least 2 years or one year experience in the IT field.
Unluckily I never worked in IT longer than a months in service desk IT, and if you count up all it were barely 4 months. 2 months for a telecommunication company writing documentations. Another time I was 8 days in a rollup project before I got fired. That was in 2014.
The most experience in ICT and IT I gathered was between 2010 and 2011. And 2011 I was nearly 100% white-collar worker , besides one time were I programmed a feature for a webpage. Its not the experience the people expect.
I know numbers may be intersting. But it doesnt really change a thing if you wrote 333 job applications for 49 interviews which would mean every 6th to 7th application brought an interview. That was for november 2016. In the mean time im at 428 and the interview count only rose to 59.
And there are some very few job applications I didnt count in. But the numbers dont change anything for me. I just wrote this all down to know how things are going. And I can see that the situation is getting worser every year.
It just sucks that you here all these lies that the IT branch it booming and so on. Also I ask myself shouldnt they all now that IT people have other social skills than the "regulars". Everybody that saw a movie or tv series with atleast some IT expert should now that "we" rather seldom are the same like lets say a salesman.
What was the body language issue? What they did say you were doing with your body?
59 interviews out of 428 submitted applications is about a 14% success rate or close to 1 in 7.
Not too shabby. I think in the the US it's like 1 in 20 in 2010 and that was before it got bad. It was probably 1 in 50 towards the end of 2015.
Can you break down the types of job applications you applied into categories (for example were they all focused in I.T.? 99%) and which ones of those ended up getting you a job interview? And of those job interviews which or of those got you a second follow up in person interview or a 2nd phone interview?
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On 10/25/2017 at 1:42 PM, rloew said:
That only helps if the Clusters are aligned on 64K boundaries.
I haven't so far needed to use any alignment tools and WD or other companies no longer offer them on their website. They probably figured out how to do it internally on newer drives. I read some earlier documents there used to be a jumper to set these boundaries for XP and now these drives are jumperless.
QuoteNo one is imposing 4KB Native Drives. I have never seen one. Only SCSI supports them. All AF Drives are 512e. USB Enclosure Manufacturers decided to make 4K translating adapters as a stopgap for XP users.
Located a 2TB 4KB Native drive. I guess they are pushing these out.
Seagate 2TB 3.5 HDD V.5 (4Kn) 3.5" SATA Model ST2000NM0105
$120
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-2TB-SATA-Model-ST2000NM0105/dp/B01G3S8SGA
Vista supports 4KB so hard drive manufacturers and MS probably agreed to this standard to deal with larger capacities and squeezing more out of the platters. But they wanted a transition period so that's why we still have 512 Bytes sectored drives which was the norm. Now we are getting more of the newer drives with 4KB sectored 512 Bytes Emulated on the SATA connector end so they still work with our legacy systems though MBR capped to 2.2TB due to 32-Bit addressing Limits or using GPT to get around this. So if Vista -> W10 only still supported 512 Bytes we probably wouldn't see these 4KB Bytes 512 Emulated drives for the transition period. I'm sure they could have come up with a new drive scheme and kept 512 Byte drives and larger than 2.2TB without going to 4KB sector. SSDs can pack more than hard drives so they could probably make 256TB SSDs that just have 512 Bytes sectors but you'll need GPT to use them or a special translation adapter for MBR.
QuoteOnly 64K Physical 512e Drives are reasonable.
That's what I'm hoping for the near future. If 64KB physical sector drives with 512e means higher capacity by squeezing more data on the platters and maintaining compatibility I'll take it.
QuoteNo. It is just as fast to request 128 512B Sectors as it is to request 1 64KB Sector. The Drive is going to translate it into 1 64KB read operation either way.
Current Controllers transfer the data as one monolithic block anyway so there is no loss there either.What about the ECC overhead? That should add some extra data usage. I think 64KB with one ECC segment than 512 Bytes with 128 ECC segments would show some noticeable impact. Transferring TBs of data there might be a noticeable ECC overhead savings of 9-10% like the 512 Bytes to 4KB difference.
QuotePhysical Sectors are transparent to USB as well as SATA. The Drive can translate to 512e faster than the USB adapter, so there is no penalty to 512e.
You still need the extra Address Translation adapter or else XP 32-Bit couldn't see more than the 2.2TB. A regular SATA to USB adapter wouldn't work.
QuoteMy BOOTMAN3 DDO does the job with Internal Drives. How do you think I booted DOS with a 128TiB C: Partition.
That's nice but booting to a large capacity drive and not being able to do everything like in Windows XP or accessing USB 3.0 speed drives makes DOS->ME too limited. It's a shame the XP source code hasn't leaked yet as it probably could blow away W10 with the right programmers.
QuoteThe E-Bay sellers are just selling unbranded Cards under this own name. Zero technical knowledge required.
PATA Controllers are far simpler than SATA. The one in the E-Bay picture is a very basic design using a microcontroller.Nowadays they just slap an existing IDE Controller chip and some glue logic on a card. The Chip is manufactured in a foundry.
I think you could build a better SATA to SATA hardware address translating adapter given your evaluation of this eBay product. All hardware based that supports DOS -> Windows 10 transparent to the user avoiding unnecessary patches to each OS. The eBay example is just demonstrating the competition which isn't much at the moment.
QuoteI said, I had a 4TB USB Hard Drive that did not Translate. I never Partitioned it so it is neither MBR nor GPT. I'm not sure if I had tested it with XP.
It's most likely one of the newer models and not XP compatible. They usually come as GPT and NTFS preformatted if you check. What brand and model is this you purchased?
QuoteApparently NTFS has a 32-Bit Math limit at the Cluster Level. I would have to look at the ExFAT Spec.
Probably to keep with backward compatibility to the original NTFS spec when 32-Bit was the norm. Users might need to decide to switch to ReFS to achieve 1 YB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS
QuoteThe compatibility tables are not correct. FAT32 is supported on all of the OSes listed up to 2TiB even if Microsoft refuses to let you create them
I have pushed the Cluster Size limit in Windows XP FAT32 to 256KB using 256 Byte Sectors.
If I could do the same with NTFS, it might be possible to increase the limit to 1PiB.We are still using NTFS v3.1 since XP. 1PB is still 4 times the current Windows 256TB limit. Strike a deal with MS if they decide to keep with NTFS and hold off from ReFS and offer this patch as NTFS v3.2. Have you checked if the 256TB NTFS limit applies to MAC OS and Linux?
QuoteI use tray-less racks. This allow me to swap Drives easily. I do have to reboot though.
USB is a life savior here in plugging in drives real quick to move data and disconnect. I would have considered eSATA if hot PnP was consistent for higher transfers speeds. Firewire was actually a pretty good technology compared to USB 2.0. Hooking up DV Cams for HD recording barely overwhelmed even a Pentium-M 1 GHz. But USB is still more versatile being able to connect to more than just storage drives.
QuoteThe USB limit is 128 per Root Controller.
Yes I know since the advertisement signs of Windows 98 and USB. But in reality no one is going to hook up 128 USB devices and the bandwidth is split among all the USB devices so there are pros and cons which is why USB 4.0 needs to be 100x USB 3.0 speeds or at least 1600 Gbps (The same factor jump from USB 1.0 to 2.0).
QuoteThe listing is gone. It is obviously an AHCI Controller. You can have 32 Direct Ports. Each Port can be expanded with a FIS Multiplier.
It might work with XP if you add an AHCI Driver. The newest UNIATA appears to have AHCI Built-in.It was up earlier probably not a hot seller so it was taken down.
Ableconn PEX10-SAT 10 Port SATA 6G PCI Express Host Adapter Card - AHCI 6 Gbps
QuoteYou don't "chain" them. You put them in separate PCI/PCI-E Slots.
I didn't literally mean "daisy chaining" them like SCSI. I meant all PCI/PCIe slots (7 max so far I've seen) all hooked up internally all lined up side by side taking all internal Motherboard slots looks like a chain of USB port cards.
QuoteI think the BIOS limits you to 31 Hard Disks. Windows 9x has some minor issues above 8.
Up to 31 Hard Disks for anything connected to the on board SATA ports?
What about previous generations from SCSI, ESDI, IDE, RLL and dating back MFM?
Do internal SATA cards count toward this 31HD BIOS limit? If so would one SATA card be counted as "1" no matter how many ports or do all SATA ports count toward this limit even on the cards?
Do all 7 SATA cards work together in DOS or are they pretty much dead except only to provided driver supported Operating Systems?
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16 hours ago, rloew said:
For best performance, the Cluster Size should be at least the Physical Sector Size.
That was my point in having 64KB drive physical sector sizes and using 64KB AUS or Cluster Sizes on the OS side.
QuoteMicrosoft does not acknowledge support in XP.
I think the 4K Support may have been for SCSI, which allows different Sector Size Formats to be used even in a single Drive.
Windows 9x has some support up to 2K Sectors built in. I don't remember if it was complete.They don't which is why if they are already imposing 4KB native drives which is not XP compatible then no reason to not just jump to 64KB native drives and skip these interim jumps from 8KB-64KB. They would be able to come up with OS patches today if agreed between MS and drive manufacturers as the new standard.
QuoteTrue, but what is the advantage of having 64K Logical Sectors then?
Faster write rates for multiple HD video stream recording or anything bandwidth intensive.
QuoteXP would still only be able to access 2TiB with translated 512 Byte Sectors,
That's why they would release a new USB enclosure with the proper translator for XP compatibility using the 512 Bytes Sectors just as they had done previously but updated for 64KB physical sectors.
QuoteIf it is translated to 512 Bytes, the limit is still 2TiB. The 128KB I referred to earlier is the Cluster Size limit of my Patches.
Unless I can find a way of modifying the FAT32 Drivers to work with Cluster addresses rather than Sector Addresses, it won't matter.The adapter does the magic. Now if they made a SATA to SATA 32-Bit address translation adapter then you wouldn't be confined to external USB connections only.
QuoteThat Drive is an Internal Drive. The MBR says it is translated to 4K. This means that you are partitioned it using a separate Enclosure or Adapter that is translating.
That is correct. I haven't hook it up internally yet since I'm not sure if XP would try to write to it and cause corruption. I might have to do another bare internal drive test on the 3TB to get a true MBR for you.
QuoteThe Western Digital "My Book" External Drive series has 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB Models. I could not determine from the Specs if any of them translate.
No they phased them out already. Possibly eBay might have some 3rd party releases of this adapter from China but like you said you wanted a foundry before you'd reverse engineer it. I've seen plenty of eBay sellers make ISA cards with an IDE controller and I would think they are less technically knowledgeable then you.
Didn't you say you had a 4TB MBR model that could be used in XP 32-bit externally or was that a regular external 4TB GPT model?
QuoteI'm not aware of any.
It looks like we are screwed by MS then.
QuoteAs far as I know, no Motherboard with a Floppy port supports more than 2TiB in it's BIOS.
You are not using the Floppy port you are using the reserved A: and B: drive letters only. I have used A: and B: for a USB flash drive so assigning these to a 256TB GPT drive in XP GPT Loader with external USB drive support it will work.
QuoteI have no idea why the 256TiB limit. Is it a Partition limit or a Drive limit?
No idea. Ask MS directly the reasoning. All those documents have claimed this 256TB Limit. I think it has to do with the NTFS limitation but somehow exFAT suffers the same limit.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/140365/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs--fat--and-exfat
This one is more descriptive:
QuoteSupport for large volumes. NTFS can support volumes as large as 256 terabytes. Supported volume sizes are affected by the cluster size and the number of clusters. With (232 - 1) clusters (the maximum number of clusters that NTFS supports), the following volume and file sizes are supported.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn466522(v=ws.11).aspx
QuoteWhy USB External Drives, why not Internal?
Easy swapping of drives between machines running 24/7. Can't hook up these special USB address translation adapter drives to SATA ports directly. These are needed for MBR and XP 32-Bit without a XP 32-Bit GPT Loader for external USB drives.
In theory you could have up to 7 internal USB cards using PCIe / PCI slots and use an iGPU. The maximum could be 8 USB ports per USB card and 56 USB devices already max out the 26 Partition to each Drive Letter limit. So if this maximum total partitions accessible via drive letters cannot be overcome then 6.1PB will be the max possible.
Internal drives you would be limited by the amount of SATA ports usually 6-8 today on most Motherboards without expansion cards.
Found a massive 10 port SATA 6Gbps card to compete with USB ports. Vista OS and up support only on the box.
It does not have OS drivers to operate XP 32-Bit at all so the GPT internal drive idea wouldn't work except with the on Board SATA.
Did some digging around but I'm not sure how SATA cards interact with each other and can you chain 7 of these cards and still work with the onboard SATA controllers to get 78 SATA ports?
Do SATA cards allow access to drives in DOS or are they dead till you are in the OS with the proper drivers loaded?
My experience with Intel and Asmedia SATA controllers requires the SATA driver to be slipstreamed first or no drive access.
Most other SATA cards I've seen usually are 4 Ports so 36=28+8 on Board Max possible Sata Ports assuming they have XP 32-Bit driver support.
USB still seems to be a simpler solution for adding drives and maxing out the Twenty Six 256TB Max Partition Size / Drive Letters Limit.
Also limited internal drive space to mount them all. It would be possible to stack a bunch of USB external drives and chain a bunch of power strips.
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5 hours ago, jaclaz said:
And the MBR you posted is a PBR or VBR or volume boot sector, NOT a Master Boot Record.
.
This was what would be the MBR according to Hex Workshop. Remember this is via the USB external adapter so if this alters what you wanted to see you better explain in detail the program and method you use to acquire the MBR.
I already stated prior that anyone who wanted the opportunity to make suggestions of tools you wanted used for any information gathering rather than complain about not seeing the MBR which you didn't care about.
But given you identify this as a PBR/VBR what interesting tid bits did you decipher and salivate upon MR. MBR/PBR/VBR analyst?
QuoteHowever it is interesting a 14 byte wide visualization.
No kidding. It was meant to preserve the data so someone like you or anyone into analyzing this could copy and analyze the information rather than a static photo snapshot.
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9 hours ago, rloew said:
I do Windows 9x programming as well. The DOS RAMDisks work well enough that making a Windows Version was not a priority. I probably could rewrite my USB Mass Storage Driver to act as a RAMDisk.
Whatever makes it easier to create it in 9X/ME and fully robust.
QuoteA GUI Interface is just fluff.
Customers love the fluff.
Guilty.
QuoteUSB Sound Cards and Adapters work fine with Windows 98. The Motherboard doesn't matter.
The standard Drivers do that.
If you are talking about DOS USB Drivers, some exist.
You kind of missed what I was asking. Regarding Intel USB 2.0, in 98SE Real DOS (not inside 98SE OS) could you find a way to bridge USB device detection using the 9X/ME core system files? So as long as the user owned a 98SE CD to get the core and system files and used your DOS/USB interface program it could then in 98SE Real DOS basically detect any USB devices (USB Keyboard, USB Mouse, USB audio device, USB gaming controller, USB network device) or whatever USB device that used 9X/ME native USB drivers without requiring an additional manufacture driver to work). A lot of these USB devices simply are plug and play in 9X/ME. If you could make 98SE Real DOS run as normal but with added 9X/ME USB detection that allowed any USB devices connected to the USB 2.0 ports like a USB sound device could then be plugged in and on a hardware level any Real DOS based game could directly access this USB sound device for audio output. Adding a USB game controller would automatically work as if it were a legacy PC joystick. Is this within your programming expertise?
QuoteA long time ago.
8GB was still an optimal partition size for 98SE until probably a decade ago. For daily 98SE usage today I'd probably go with a 16GB partition.
QuoteEven if you are using a 2TB Drive, the FAT32 Partitions were nowhere near that size with 512 Bytes or 4K AUS. The minimum AUS size for a FAT32 Partition larger than 1TiB is 8K.
64K AUS is considered non-standard. Unmodified DOS won't boot and DEBUG will not save data.Maybe for NTFS, but FAT32 Partitions that size will use 32K AUS.
The 2TB drives are using NTFS not FAT32. That's how the 512 Bytes, 4KB, and 64KB HD recording overload bandwidth test comparison was done. Only a few earlier WD externals I had converted to full FAT32 and yes they used the large 32KB AUS as you described. These earlier 2TB FAT32 drives I used for DVD ripping only since they used 1GB VOB file sizes max. NTFS is geared toward > 4GB file sizes where Blu-rays and HD videos fall for > 2TB drives. But all 2TB drives I have had since are using NTFS.
QuoteI don't think it does if connect the Drive and grab the data without using Explorer or other Windows Functions.
Perhaps by disabling AutoPlay it wouldn't tamper with the drive at all. Not entirely sure. Only a DOS clone would seem the safest.
QuoteI keep telling you that 64K Logical Sectors will not happen.
I was giving it some thought. It might not happen soon but given 64KB Physical sector drive size wouldn't actually be needed yet but if a pure 64KB Physical sector drive through the drive controller appeared as 64KB sectors and a proper OS support patch was done this would really benefit high transfer rates for large HD file sizes.
I started thinking about this USB adapter some more as I never really cared about it except that it worked. The drive inside appears to be a 4K sector drive but with 512e out the hard drive Sata connector.
So the adapter doesn't really do any 4KB -> 512 Byte translation as I originally had thought since the drive does this natively. It wouldn't matter if the hard drive had a 64KB sector size anymore to break the MBR barrier. It can be a 4KB sector drive or even a 512 Bytes sector size drive as both should work. I think the adapter is really an address translator to the 32-Bit legacy limit. So any drive over 18TB would probably still work and won't corrupt the drive since you couldn't access that region or anything above 18TB. Now if this address translator could be dumped and modified you could actually get 256TB MBR or higher capacities as long as the source drive was 512e and made the proper address translation changes done on the translation adapter side. Since there is a hard disk transition from 512 and 512e to pure 4KB sector drives it's hard to guess when 512e drives will no longer be made but the writing is on the wall and since Windows 7 64-Bit already understands 4KB sectors only XP 32-Bit and lower will be affected unless patched. A new adapter board would need to be made to accept pure 4KB sector drives and do a conversion to do address translation to the 32-Bit limit and it would once again work on all Operating Systems at least from 2000 SP3 and XP SP1 and up for higher than 18TB MBR capacities.
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2 hours ago, rloew said:
That would be the highest you might go with my Patched DOS. Standard DOS only supports 512 Byte Sectors.
If you are using my Patched DOS, you might as well use my EMBR as well. You won't need 16KB Sectors until you exceed 16TiB Per Partition or 384TiB total.
I see I thought you were stating regular 98SE DOS could handle 32KB Byte Sectors. There must be a lot of people using your EMBR I assume if they are using your Patched DOS. But how many are using Patched DOS on say a SkyLake or Coffee Lake? Those would probably be the ones needing this as most P4 up to Ivy Bridge users probably are sticking with 512 Byte Sector drives like myself for the time being.
QuoteMy point was that it is not free.
It's difficult to know what project will reap the benefits of your time spent.
QuoteI have a Multi-Core API that lets you write Applications that you other Cores.
Yes I know I was speaking about a way for MultiCore support on all standard 9X/ME applications even with your patch it would benefit greatly.
QuoteWriting a DOS RAMDisk was much simpler.
Writing DOS programs is your expertise but I wish there was a true 9X/ME Windows based one that took advantage of the 4GB+ memory range and highly configurable GUI interface like most XP commercial ones. It's a shame no more true 9X/ME Windows programmers out there.
QuoteYou will have to bug nVidia about that.
I'm sure plenty have already and were rejected as they focused on 2K/XP drivers.
QuoteThere is no USB 3 for Windows 9x. I plan to do some more work in this in the near future.
Hopefully it will pan out. I have another idea that might fit your background.
On an Intel USB 2.0 Motherboard.
In 98SE DOS could you find a way for accessing the USB sound card for sound output?
Is there a way for you to detect USB devices using 98SE/ME based VXD or WDM files.
A gateway if you may of 9X/ME USB device detection but accessible under 98SE Real DOS.
QuoteWhy would you use 512 Byte Clusters on any FAT32 Partition?
The default is 4K for the smallest ones and 32K for large ones.Small text files, web sites pages, pictures would suit this size in the past. Recently everything has bloated in size so 4KB would be a better AUS for efficiency.
I remember researching the best partition size and 8GB was the optimal for FAT32.
The drives I'm using now are 8TB drives and NTFS only.
Anything over 2TB will most likely be NTFS. The 512 Bytes AUS was done on a 2TB. Another identical 2TB I used 4KB, and another at 64KB.
These three AUSs were tested and showed positive proof through recording multiple streams the 512 Bytes AUS lagged more likely when overloaded and 64KB didn't.
Most large capacity drives come preformatted for 4KB AUS but later I began switching to 64KB AUS since then. This is where I had to transfer 8TB to another newly formatted 8TB with 64KB AUS. Once all files were moved I reformatted the source drive to match the AUS.
QuoteThere are other XP USB 3.0 Drivers such as Asmedia.
Yes this doesn't exist on all Motherboards. Intel USB 3.0 ports seem to be dominating.
QuoteI was the first to break the 137GB barrier on Windows 9x. If you want to live with 120GB Drives, that's up to you. I will stick with my 4TB and 6TB Drives.
There are available 3rd Party alternatives but I would rather stick with not modifying my 9X. 9X is really only worth using on a P4 or P3 with ISA slots. From what I've seen XP seems to run all 9X/ME software and on multiple cores so 9X is still more of a hobbyist OS today.
QuoteI only bother to save what's on a new Drive when it has some software pre-stored on it, not just an empty Partition.
That's what I normally do. But once you connect the drive via USB it probably will add a Recycled Bin Folder to the drive.
I'll probably wipe it soon enough to do a few quick tests.
QuoteAccording to you these are the new normal.
Not exactly the new normal more like the stale normal for a few years but forced by MS when they dropped support of XP officially in 2014 they began shipping drives that were GPT with no adapters so only a GPT capable OS could only use them and not XP. Had MS shut up and kept supporting XP I'm sure they would have continued shipping these XP compatible drives today. If MS had stopped XP support in 2025 and 64TB drives were out they would have made new 64KB special adapters for XP to use them.
QuoteA Floppy or Super-Floppy has no MBR or Partitions, just a PBR to Boot. When booted they become A:.
Yes but I don't think a Super-Floppy has to be bootable just as a regular floppy can just be formatted without sys and blank.
QuoteSize matters. 2.88MB and below is a Floppy
Yes I know I still have 2.88MB Floppies. Tape drives, Zip drives, and then the optical drives wiped them out.
2.88MB never standardized. Maybe if they had jumped to 28.8MB it might have been worth adopting to fit 20 3.5" 1.44MB disks. Going double the size wasn't enough to compete.
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4 hours ago, rloew said:
You keep missing the point. Large Physical Sectors never were a problem except maybe for performance. Any OS will run, no matter the Physical Sector size.The major incompatibilities I refer to are related to Logical Sector Sizes. Making larger Logical Sector Sizes does not improve performance or Storage capacity.
It only bumped the MBR limit. Never OSes support GPT so there is no issue there.The Large Physical Sectors is on the Hard Drive side. There is no performance boost from 4KB to 64KB that I'm speculating. There was a space efficiency boost from 512 Bytes to 4KB sector drives. So switching from 4KB to 64KB you'd cram another 16 (4KB) chunks into one chunk and use less space on the platters.
Look here for a better description from Seagate as I don't make drives I just use them. Although at one point we had to create a dust free sanitary environment to mimic a clean room and remove drive platters for swapping during the MFM days.
https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/
The Physical Sector Size as you put is is the same as the Allocation Unit Size if we are on the same page here.
Quote64K Logical Sectors would require major changes to all existing OSes so no one is going to bother.
Sure they already did bother us with 4KB Sector Drives and XP wasn't around when these drives were released.
I'm using these drives in USB enclosures so as long as the adapter does the 64KB Logical sector size -> 512 Bytes Emulated bride for XP 32-Bit that's all that matters. We don't have to care about what kind of Logical sector size the hard drive has but what XP 32-Bit sees from the USB side. It could be 128KB LSS if you're certain LSS doesn't affect OS compatibility on the hard drive and we'd increase the MBR capacity again going higher.
QuoteYou said they stopped using translators in 6TB Drives. I don't have any, so I can't verify. If so, 4K will probably disappear leaving 512e Drives only.
As far as I could tell 5GB was the cut off point. But some early 8TB models could exist before it was phased and those were quite expensive when released to consider purchasing. There was no 6TB model from what I could remember I think they simply skipped to 8TB. But Bare 6TB drives do exist so they could have made a 6TB model. I believe the drives that are compatible are 4K AF and 512e drives. Check out the 8TB model I listed and the specs. You know more about the MBR code then most people here so examine it and tell me what do you see?
QuoteI know of no way to support more than 26 Partitions simultaneously in DOS, Windows 9x or any Windows NT without major changes.
This why I consider the limit of Windows 9x to be 384TiB, or 416TiB if I can get A: and B: on board. DOS gets a limit of 3PiB or 3.25PiB for the same reasons.Yes but what about newer Windows versions? Didn't they run into this problem on Servers and find a way to do what I proposed extending the Drive Letter Mapping sequence?
As for A: and B: you can use them on XP as well but some people still have internal Floppy Drives and USB Floppy Drive would hog B:.
If you removed both then you could use both letters to gain 2 more Drive Letters for an extra 512TB.
In Windows with NTFS and exFAT the limit should be
26 x 256TB = 6144TB or 6.1PB of data on XP 32-Bit with GPT Loader with USB external drives.
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4 hours ago, rloew said:
DOS puts it's Sector Buffers in a single Segment. With a 32-Bit Sector plus a few Bytes of overhead, only one Sector will fit.
I did a file compare using a program that read the files in small pieces. It would have run for hours, even on fairly small files.
When I analyzed it, DOS was reading a Sector to supply a small piece of one File, then reading a Sector to supply a small piece of the second File.
It then had to repeat this process on the same two Sectors until all of them had been transferred to the Program, before going on to the next pair of Sectors.Switching to 16K Sectors, allowed 3 Buffers and the Program ran at a reasonable rate.
No connection. I have increased the Cluster Size limit to 128KB with 512 Byte Sectors or 8MB with 32K Sectors.
So you feel 16KB sector drives to be the best transitional upgrade from 4KB sector drives if hard drive manufacturers were to maintain DOS compatibility.
But again we probably both would be using 512 Byte drives as a Primary Drive anyhow so this is just a minor annoyance and we both have our own stockpile of legacy drives that this won't be an issue.
QuoteI already did it.
Only with the DDO but not the real deal yet which will be possibly a decade from now.
QuoteTell that to the waitress when she hands you the bill.
Yes whenever I get the chance to go out anymore. But when I do I give a 20% Tip sometimes 25%.
These days it's the occasional drive thru so no waitresses or waiters.
We got to spend our money wisely these days.
QuoteThen don't blame me for choosing it.
Never did.
QuoteI thought you cared about Windows 9x.
Sure I still use it for bootable recovery. If only Multicore was possible to use just like XP. Even tricking 9X/ME to use one core per process/application would be a poor man's multicore balancing but would spread the processing power away from just one core. That's the biggest modern obstacle I see now. The memory issue isn't too big of a deal but a Windows 9X/ME internal based Ramdrive rather than DOS based to use the > 4GB region would have been a blessing and match my XP Ramdrive in robustness. Only other upgrades that would benefit is possibly getting GeForce 8 series video cards with HDMI ports to work in 9X/ME to increase the visual quality. Sadly none of these features are going to be addressed making 9X/ME very limited in functionality. I know you are focused on money and nothing is free. But I don't even know if anyone else out there could trump these issues for good.
On a positive note, I did some preliminary tests on an AMD AM4 Motherboard and 98SE worked on it. There was no memory issue like ragnargd had experienced. AM4 and Z170 both can boot into 98SE. I can't explain why his setup didn't work. We will never know the truth.
QuoteHow often do you move TeraBytes of data to or from USB Drives?
It takes a long time with Internal Drives, far longer with USB.
It takes a long time. However that was with USB 2.0. On USB 3.0 I'm seeing and although Dencorso had a different benchmark result my own real time transfers between USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0 look to be about 3.0 times faster. I might have to use a benchmark tool to see what it calculates any programs come to mind?
But TBs yes I have had to transfer between two 8TB drives. This was before I figured out the cause of the lag. When recording 10 HD video streams simultaneously to one drive (especially more noticeable on laptop 2.5" drives) around 3-4 HD streams it eventually couldn't keep up and would cause a complete lag out or hiccup in the recording. This was using 512 Bytes Allocation Unit sizes. Later I switched to 4KB AUS but even recording around 4-6 HD Video streams the same thing happened. I finally switched to 64KB AUS and no more hiccups.
I believe it's all those Allocation Units causing a bandwidth jam of some sort. So while 64KB are quite large and inefficient for small text files, large HD video files love it.
QuoteI can backup my 4TB Internal Drives to another Internal Drive in about 8 hours using a DOS Program I wrote. It would take 24 hours in Windows. I hate to think how long it would take with USB.
8TB external USB drives even at USB 2.0 speeds can handle 8-10 HD Video stream recording just fine. USB 3.0 is mainly for video splicing. But with USB 3.0 in Vista this would cut down the transfer rates to a 1/3 of the time. With Windows 7 this might be improved with Intel USB 3.0 xHCI drivers. Also most of this transferring is going on in the background or while I'm asleep. DOS you can't multitask and doesn't have Intel USB 3.0 xHCI transfer rate speeds support so you will be operating at USB 2.0 speeds anyhow so no match for Windows 7.
For internal drives yes 2TB would be the best MBR fastest transfer while maintaining legacy MBR compatibility. I kept filling up these 2TB external USB drives so often that it was necessary to switch to 8TB drives at a cost of using a power adapter but saving 3 USB ports. When 18TB 2.5" is affordable these will be the go to drives in the future and reduce my drives to half their numbers per USB port.
QuoteSo far.
Yup and hopefully an internal GPT Loader won't be necessary till 64TB or 128TB or stall till 256TB where it is maxed out for internal drives and affordable to the masses. I think if I can hold out on 18TB MBR 2.5" drives I'll be okay with not going full GPT. An XP GPT Loader for internal and external USB drives would only accelerate my pace to GPT adoption as early as 20TB if 18TB is truly the predicted testable MBR max.
QuoteBy your own statements it doesn't sound very profitable.
If I could solve the Math issue in XP, it would be far easier to implement my EMBR than a GPT Loader or support.Well XP is still holding around 5-6% Globally so I wouldn't say it's not very profitable. I'm saying if you came out with a fully functional 2K/XP GPT Loader for internal and external drives today you could start milking it. It's like you are holding the fort door from opening. But once the fort door is thrust open it's too late and you're slaughtered. So think of it this way. GPT drives in XP today people won't flock to Vista, W7, W10 because of storage capacity constraints and maintaining forward compatibility with these newer Operating Systems so it's a game changer. The only other upgrade feature would be giving XP 32-Bit OS memory support beyond 3GB say even to 128GB like its XP Professional 64-Bit counterpart. Although the 128GB might be overkill today so pushing it to 8GB->16GB OS usable memory would probably be sufficient today. The rest could still be reserved for the XP Ramdrive. And the last linchpin would be when Intel USB 3.0 xHCI driver for Windows XP 32-Bit / 64-Bit and possibly Vista 32/64-Bit exists. These features would breathe possibly another decade of life into these relics.
QuoteMore efficient for Drive Letters but less for performance.
Performance is quite sufficient on USB 2.0. On USB 3.0 it is a substantial improvement but it's the video editing part that is demanding so using a Ramdrive to store the file temporarily speeds things up.
QuotePresumably Paragon found a solution. I have also seen others that make the Hard Drive look like multiple smaller Hard Drives. I already did this with Windows 9x but chose EMBR as a better solution.
Yes in 2TB chunks or limited to the first 2TB. GPT Mounter was one. But not one has the capability to read/write to an external GPT drive on 2K / XP just yet.
QuoteI believe there may have been a warning or they simply dropped Windows 9x from the compatible OS list.
No warning on the outside manufacturer box at all. Yes I still have these. It was a Maxtor brand when they were well known in the industry dating back to the MFM days. I have a few of these 5 1/4" behemoths. They were loud but considered the best at the time. It was a painful lesson that instilled in me to stick to hardware solutions than software solutions. 128GB drives you never have to worry about data corruption which has carried with me to this date despite the 2TB barrier being broken there's just something comfortable with using these older lower capacity drives since DOS/3.1/9X/ME/NT 3.X/4.0 don't use up a lot of space.
QuoteThe hint about a (super-)floppy (that you didn't seemingly catch) by cdob is actually an interesting one, however. and could well be the target for a further experiment.
Most probably a filter driver (such as the reversed dummydisk,sys) to make the hard disk a "Removable" (please read as "non-partitioned") device might be needed (or maybe not) for the test on an internal disk.
The test on a USB super-floppy makes little sense since (if) the USB adapter already translates sector size to 4 Kb, there are no issues up to 17.6 Tb, thus it sounds more than anything else a solution in search of a problem.
There's a difference between "Floppy" vs "Super Floppy" although the LS-120 and LS-240 would probably be known as" Super Floppies" which I own. If there's any need to experiment then a complete write up of what needs to be done but personally I'm not sure what the point of that would have been since 8TB as one NTFS partition works fine the way it is but on the 3TB it might be worth playing around since I have no valuable data on it just yet. -- Jaclaz? I'd still like to clone it first for people to analyze or restore back to factory new condition.
QuoteIt would be needed an USB adapter capable of accessing >2.2Tb disks while NOT translating sector size, which looks even more pointless.
These exist and yes what would be the point of these?
QuoteA partitionless (super-floppy) Disk is an interesting possibility. It would have to be NTFS to push the limit.
Unfortunately, it probably would not work in XP for the same reasons as the 4TiB approach unless USB does not have the Math Problem.
I do have a 4TB USB Drive that is not translated, I could test with. Pointless maybe but inexpensive.So you can't partition it at all?
QuoteQuote from:
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-disk-director-forum/what-super-floppy
As I understand it now, 'super floppy' means a removable drive that does not have partitions.
The best way to make sure you always get partitions might be to use DISKPART to manage the drive/volume.
I could be wrong.I've had a few of these as Flash drives. But by this definition a USB floppy drive is a 1.44MB Super Floppy.
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FINAL RESERVED SLOT
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. Some people have made it easy to transfer to a USB flash drive simplifying the process.
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What are the requirements to get an entry level IT support job(aka first level aka service desk)?
in The Poll Center
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I was on the Q/A gaming side. They'd have to pay at least $50,000 to take that kind of offer and relocate finding a place and assimilate. Probably miss home too much so not more than a year. Sounds like they were looking for cheap labor.
The VAIOs are probably my favorite brand laptops. I think I have around 2 dozen hoarded VAIOs a good number of them in my room stashed. Sadly they stopped making their laptops. I can't say much for their desktops being a custom builder but I did have one P4 VAIO that was completely fanless cooled which was pretty impressive then.
I'm not sure when you were there but some stand out laptop models I own.
Vaio TR series - also used in the Facebook movie - The Social Network.
X505 - the James Bond thinnest lightest model ever made and completely fanless.
NR-NW models seems to my favorite for XP legacy support.
After this generation no more dial up modem ports and I think Firewire ports also got discontinued so no more DVCam.
What is this CE?
Something to do with this?
https://www.cepro.com/company/sony
You were into home theater setups?