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2 TiB limit size in MBR hard drives


Cixert

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On 10/11/2017 at 10:13 AM, jaclaz said:

Well, these drivers provide to "normal" XP BOTH  GPT support AND access to bigger than 2.2 Tb (512 bytes sectored) disk drives, that is the whole point, and, compare with this:

http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/GPTLoader_RG_081111.pdf

at least they allow (of course in GPT style) a "monolithic" partition/volume of 3 Tb.

It may be the case that the "GPT" part of the driver is the only thing 64-bit needed and then NTFS.SYS takes care of the "monolithic" partition/volume (that anyway begins at a normal offset of 63 or 2048 sectors, like any other "first partition"), but if this is the case it would be a really "ugly" workaround.

jaclaz

You should consider saving up some money and buy an 8TB drive to do some experiments costing $250-$300 when not on sale.  Recently some going for under $200.  Just pop the drive out of the enclosure and it will have a SATA connector on it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LQQHLGC/ref=twister_B0751SCZW7

Does the free Paragon GPT Loader work for both read and write access to FAT32 and NTFS partitions?

Can this driver be slipstreamed into XP install CD with nLite?

Even when I'm dealing with 8TB drives I use MBR only in XP.  Theoretically the max will be 17.6TB or 17.59X but I think even an 18.0GB drive will work without problems.  In about 2 years we might have those drive capacities to find out.  12TB drives are out.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822232560&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Hard+Drives-_-Western+Digital-_-22232560&ignorebbr=1

If MBR can be extended from 2.2TB to 4.4TB or 4.39XTB on regular drives then 35.2TB or 35.19XTB might be possible using that technique in XP 32-bit.

I wouldn't consider shifting from MBR to GPT until 32TB when it becomes mandatory as no work around will exist.  Unless hard drive manufacturers start making 8K sectored drives can you test if higher capacities are possible in MBR.

 

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4 hours ago, 98SE said:

Does the free Paragon GPT Loader work for both read and write access to FAT32 and NTFS partitions?

 

Actually it has nothing to do with the filesystem, so the answer is "a suffusion of yellow", though it is entirely possible that the fastfat.sys (and much less likely the ntfs.sys) has some limitation size or address wise (as said earlier I doubt that any issue may exist in both, because of the "relative address nature of the volume access).

I understand how it may seem complex, but there is no difference whatever between a volume addressed via MBR or via GPT both only represent a way to provide an extent address to the voume and the filesystem related drivers, so the features (read/write) for a given filesystem you have in your OS will not change.

As a side note there may be issues with non-512 bytes/sector devices, however, as the driver is (was) targeted to "AF" disk drives.

The filesystem in themselves (at least FAT12 and NTFS) have no issues with 4 Kb/sectors (tested) so, since FAT12 is the earliest incarnation of FAT filesystem, FAT16 and FAT32 should have no issues as well. 

 

4 hours ago, 98SE said:

Can this driver be slipstreamed into XP install CD with nLite?

Yes and no. :w00t:

Yes it can, but not "as is", there is the need of an installer and then making a .cab for it.

I have seen such a program,  written in Autoit,:

http://reboot.pro/topic/18547-vhd-xp-setup-install-xp-in-vhd/page-6

About the suggestion on how I should spend my money, consider how till now I had no actual *need* to buy any disk larger than 500 Gb, so it will be a loong time before I will even think about buying a multi Tb disk, and even more time going beyond 4 Tb.

But - and this should be checked thoroughfully - I believed :unsure: that only 3 Tb and 4 Tb disks are common in "AF" format, whilst bigger ones are mostly "native 4k" (and thus the MBR limits is shifted to 17.6 Tb [1]).

jaclaz

 

[1] The exact number is not "negotiable", the 32 bit field in the MBR allows for 2^32-1 sectors=4,294,967,295 so:

4,294,967,295*512=2,199,023,255,040 bytes

4,294,967,295*4096=17,592,186,040,320

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3 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Actually it has nothing to do with the filesystem, so the answer is "a suffusion of yellow", though it is entirely possible that the fastfat.sys (and much less likely the ntfs.sys) has some limitation size or address wise (as said earlier I doubt that any issue may exist in both, because of the "relative address nature of the volume access).

I understand how it may seem complex, but there is no difference whatever between a volume addressed via MBR or via GPT both only represent a way to provide an extent address to the voume and the filesystem related drivers, so the features (read/write) for a given filesystem you have in your OS will not change.

As a side note there may be issues with non-512 bytes/sector devices, however, as the driver is (was) targeted to "AF" disk drives.

The filesystem in themselves (at least FAT12 and NTFS) have no issues with 4 Kb/sectors (tested) so, since FAT12 is the earliest incarnation of FAT filesystem, FAT16 and FAT32 should have no issues as well. 

 

Yes and no. :w00t:

Yes it can, but not "as is", there is the need of an installer and then making a .cab for it.

I have seen such a program,  written in Autoit,:

http://reboot.pro/topic/18547-vhd-xp-setup-install-xp-in-vhd/page-6

About the suggestion on how I should spend my money, consider how till now I had no actual *need* to buy any disk larger than 500 Gb, so it will be a loong time before I will even think about buying a multi Tb disk, and even more time going beyond 4 Tb.

But - and this should be checked thoroughfully - I believed :unsure: that only 3 Tb and 4 Tb disks are common in "AF" format, whilst bigger ones are mostly "native 4k" (and thus the MBR limits is shifted to 17.6 Tb [1]).

jaclaz

 

[1] The exact number is not "negotiable", the 32 bit field in the MBR allows for 2^32-1 sectors=4,294,967,295 so:

4,294,967,295*512=2,199,023,255,040 bytes

4,294,967,295*4096=17,592,186,040,320

So you were able to read/write to the GPT drive (with Paragon GPT Loader) in XP 32-bit on both FAT32 and NTFS partitions without issues?

8TB one time investment for a Jaclaz unending experiment to crack the MBR limit. ;)

500GB is not common anymore and usually a joke capacity around here but certainly the last capacity for WD where you could extract 2.5 laptop hard drives before they soldered the USB connector into it.  Even 2TB 2.5" laptop drives are getting scarcer being replaced by 3TB and 4TB which is unfortunate.  For 3.5" 4TB and up is very common here.  No point in getting a larger 2TB 3.5" when a smaller compact laptop 2.5" exists.

If you can buy a 8TB 3.5" then you can see if 4.4 or 6.6 MBR limit is possible.  If you can achieve 6.6TB MBR limit without any sort of adapter that would be a miracle on MBR,

The only other possibility is a software version of the hardware adapter to do the 4K sector to 512 byte conversion which can later be adapted to 8K sector drives.

16TB and 18TB will be very expensive so testing this limit will probably be possible in 5 years when prices drop enough to sane levels.

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8 minutes ago, 98SE said:

So you were able to read/write to the GPT drive (with Paragon GPT Loader) in XP 32-bit on both FAT32 and NTFS partitions without issues?

No, I don't have ANY hard disk larger than 500 Gb, and though I have a copy of the GPT Loader I never installed nor used it.

I did test NTFS and FAT12 on (emulated) 4 Kb disk drives successfully.

What is the diffcult part in:

3 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Actually it has nothing to do with the filesystem, so the answer is "a suffusion of yellow", though it is entirely possible that the fastfat.sys (and much less likely the ntfs.sys) has some limitation size or address wise (as said earlier I doubt that any issue may exist in both, because of the "relative address nature of the volume access).

I understand how it may seem complex, but there is no difference whatever between a volume addressed via MBR or via GPT both only represent a way to provide an extent address to the voume and the filesystem related drivers, so the features (read/write) for a given filesystem you have in your OS will not change.

As a side note there may be issues with non-512 bytes/sector devices, however, as the driver is (was) targeted to "AF" disk drives.

The filesystem in themselves (at least FAT12 and NTFS) have no issues with 4 Kb/sectors (tested) so, since FAT12 is the earliest incarnation of FAT filesystem, FAT16 and FAT32 should have no issues as well. 

 

jaclaz

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3 hours ago, jaclaz said:

No, I don't have ANY hard disk larger than 500 Gb, and though I have a copy of the GPT Loader I never installed nor used it.

I did test NTFS and FAT12 on (emulated) 4 Kb disk drives successfully.

What is the diffcult part in:

jaclaz

 

I didn't see the part where you never used it.

If you ever plan on testing the GPT Loader you can convert the 500GB from MBR to GPT.

On XP 32-bit with Paragon GPT Loader loaded and hooked up to a 500 GB or less capacity hard drive that is GPT  you could make two partitions one FAT32 and one NTFS.  Do read and write tests on each partition with some video files or something large enough and try testing the files. 

 

The biggest limitation and probably the death blow of this GPT Loader having real adoption is you can't access GPT on USB external hard drives which is where I would see it most useful.  I remember asking their company a few years ago if they were going to fix this and apparently nothing resulted yet.  I can't seem to find any confirmation if the GPT Loader was limited to 3TB or limited to the GPT's max of about 256TB in Windows?  If 256TB capacity was possible for internal XP usage that would be an amazing amount of space 20 years from now.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn653570(v=vs.85).aspx#EEB

 

Edited by 98SE
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I have not yet seen a 4K Native SATA Drive. The 6TB Drives I have use 512B logical Sectors. Most, not all, USB Enclosures use 4K Logical Sectors for Drives larger than 2TiB.

I created an Extended MBR Format that supports 512TIB (512B Sectors) or 4PiB (4K Sectors) that works with Windows 9x.
I may be able to adapt it to XP if a full 64-Bit Path can be created through the Driver Stack.

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16 hours ago, 98SE said:

On XP 32-bit with Paragon GPT Loader loaded and hooked up to a 500 GB or less capacity hard drive that is GPT  you could make two partitions one FAT32 and one NTFS.  Do read and write tests on each partition with some video files or something large enough and try testing the files. 

I will try again (third and last time)

Once a volume has been mapped (and is given a drive letter or a mountpoint) the SAME drivers, respectively FASTFAT.SYS and NTFS.SYS for FAT and NTFS are used to read and write, NO MATTER if the volume is mapped via MBR, via GPT or without anything (superfloppy device) or plain device extent mapping.

The test you suggest is totally meaningless.

The only doubt that can be is on extremely large volumes, bigger than 2.2 Tb (that would make anyway no sense if FAT32 and that almost surely will work just fine with NTFS, since the NTFS has since day one 64 bit fields in the BPB)

jaclaz

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Now, then, why would I actually pay for a GPT loader for XP, if I have no 512e device bigger than 2.2 Tb? :dubbio:
I can justify paying for various of Rloew's fixes for DOS/9x, or for a very expensive pendrive (which you'd not consider a pendrive), but not for a device driver I see no use for...

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On 10/15/2017 at 11:17 AM, jaclaz said:

I will try again (third and last time)

Once a volume has been mapped (and is given a drive letter or a mountpoint) the SAME drivers, respectively FASTFAT.SYS and NTFS.SYS for FAT and NTFS are used to read and write, NO MATTER if the volume is mapped via MBR, via GPT or without anything (superfloppy device) or plain device extent mapping.

The test you suggest is totally meaningless.

The only doubt that can be is on extremely large volumes, bigger than 2.2 Tb (that would make anyway no sense if FAT32 and that almost surely will work just fine with NTFS, since the NTFS has since day one 64 bit fields in the BPB)

jaclaz

You haven't tested the GPT Loader so there is no actual confirmation you tested reading and writing to FAT32 and NTFS under those conditions.  I'm not disputing FAT32 and NTFS don't work on GPT since I've tested 16TB on Vista before so I know it works.  It's seeing whether the GPT Loader can handle this under XP 32-bit that got me curious.  It's only meaningless to you since you are okay with believing something works without testing it.  I prefer to go the extra mile to confirm.  Just as we have predicted the 9th planet but until actual physical photographic proof of it most won't be fully satisfied.

The reason the 500GB MBR to GPT transformation was suggested for testing is that capacity would still work under both conditions.

If you don' t have the means or interest yet to test it don't worry about it.

 

On 10/15/2017 at 4:18 PM, dencorso said:

Now, then, why would I actually pay for a GPT loader for XP, if I have no 512e device bigger than 2.2 Tb? :dubbio:
I can justify paying for various of Rloew's fixes for DOS/9x, or for a very expensive pendrive (which you'd not consider a pendrive), but not for a device driver I see no use for...

You don't need to have a larger than 2.2TB drive to use GPT.  I've had a few used 16GB Flash drives using that required diskpart to destroy them to make them MBR.  I wouldn't pay for a GPT Loader at this moment since MBR should be capable of 17.6TB and if 32TB won't work I'll probably end up switching to GPT entirely for 64TB and larger drives up to 256TB which might be 10-20 years from now.  I think most would have switched to XP Pro 64-Bit or Windows 7 64-Bit by the time these drives are common.

But given the cost and lesser license restriction headaches I pick what benefits me or is useful.  I think I downloaded the Free version many years ago when then 2.2TB to 3.0TB MBR issue popped up and GPT Loader was free at the time.  So it's a matter of finding what the name of the file was originally called and where the hundreds of hard drives did I store it on which is like finding a needle in a haystack.

I have many flash drives and pen drives so I'm not sure where you got the idea I don't use them.  My argument for you was the pen drive was not an accurate representation of calculating the actual speed of USB 3.0 given the small capacity of files you transfer.  If your pen drive or flash drive was at least 1TB it might just enough data to get a good estimate of the sustained transfer rates.

I remember when the 1GB flash drive used to cost around $170 since I bought one and that was quite large for 98SE at the time.  Now would I consider paying $1500 for a 2TB Pen drive?  Nope.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242416&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-Memory+(USB+Flash+Drive)-_-N82E16820242416&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInbu3yvf01gIVXrXACh38GAvxEAQYBCABEgKItvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Even back than the cost for 1GB was excessive but as a one time purchase still worth it.

It would be cheaper to get one of these and use a SATA to USB adapter to get similar enough performance for a fraction of the cost.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&O=&Q=&ap=y&c3api=1876%2C{creative}%2C{keyword}&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4eX7gfj01gIVGrXACh06zA_NEAYYAiABEgK6K_D_BwE&is=REG&m=Y&sku=1285930

 

On 10/14/2017 at 9:10 PM, rloew said:

I have not yet seen a 4K Native SATA Drive. The 6TB Drives I have use 512B logical Sectors. Most, not all, USB Enclosures use 4K Logical Sectors for Drives larger than 2TiB.

I created an Extended MBR Format that supports 512TIB (512B Sectors) or 4PiB (4K Sectors) that works with Windows 9x.
I may be able to adapt it to XP if a full 64-Bit Path can be created through the Driver Stack.

That might be interesting for 9X.  But can the drive itself be used on another clean 98SE system or do you have to install drivers on every 9X system to access this MBR Extended drive?

If it does require a special driver update to read/write/access the drive what happens when you hook this to a clean 98SE system?

How does this impact the MBR Extended drive when booting into 98SE DOS?  Can you read the drive in DOS or is it hidden?

If you can find a way to make the MBR Extended drive work on 9X or XP 32-bit without needing to install new drivers before it can be used it would gain better adoption.

 

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Obviously the Extended MBR is not going to work with unmodified DOS or Windows.

Both DOS and Windows require modifications to access above 2TiB.

The Partitions can be made visible to all. They can be hidden from DOS  to avoid BIOS issues or unmodified Windows or Linux.

If the Partition is visible, it could be damaged if put in an unmodified system.

I have not found a way to modify Windows XP so far.

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2 hours ago, rloew said:

Obviously the Extended MBR is not going to work with unmodified DOS or Windows.

Both DOS and Windows require modifications to access above 2TiB.

The Partitions can be made visible to all. They can be hidden from DOS  to avoid BIOS issues or unmodified Windows or Linux.

If the Partition is visible, it could be damaged if put in an unmodified system.

I have not found a way to modify Windows XP so far.

This is what I suspected.

What about a smaller Extended MBR based off of the Partition 1 up to 2.18TB, Partition 2 extended from 2.19TB to 4.39TB?

Would this type of 4.39TB Extended MBR drive work without updating DOS or 9X files on another system?

Could 4.39TB read access work on an unmodified DOS/9X and would the only issue be write access is where data corruption would occur?

 

Edited by 98SE
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