Olaf, please don't leave, the project needs you just<br>as much as it needs the developers.<br><br>Eric, Olaf's regression testing can not entail patching/rebuilding<br>the system to accomodate disk structure (as you surely realize).<br>
That said, your reasons for change are sound, but perhaps you<br><div>can make provisions to temporarily revert this if it causes massive</div><div>problems. The timing _is_ not good if indeed a release is close</div><div>
at hand.. Can it wait until after the release?</div><br>Alex, calling Olaf "not an OS tester" is a bit harsh, don't you think?<br>Not everyone can be as weather hardened and experienced as you are.<br><br>Regarding the reasons for change:<br>
<br>Max CHS capacity: 10 bit C, 6 bit S, 8 bit H<br> 2^10 * 2^6 * 255 == 16711680 sect(512) == 8.5 GB<br><br> This is the geometry Eric wants to use, which makes sense<br> because it can utilize the full CHS addressing capacity,<br>
and reflects the absolute limit of BIOS int 13h CHS calls.<br> <br>Previous 32S 64H CHS limit:<br> 2^10 * 32 * 64 == 2097152 sect(512) == 1 GB<br><div><br></div><div>This is an artificial and unnecessary limit, imposed by some</div>
<div>strange design decision in Redmond a long long time ago.</div><div><br></div><div>For non-devs: In CHS mode BIOS has an absolute disk limit of 8.5 GB,</div><div>due to the available address bits, a 10/6 bit Cylinder/Sector composite,</div>
<div>and an 8 bit head number. Any disk bigger than that can only be addressed</div><div>in LBA mode (logical sector nr), which has a limit of 2^32 sectors == 2 TB.<br></div>And, if anyone didn't know, the geometry parameters are stored<br>
in the boot sector, not in the MBR.<br>There's more to it, but I stop at that.<br><br>So.. Eric's change _should_ not cause any problem on disks<br>larger than 8.5 GB, since they run in LBA mode by necessity.<br>Concordingly, there could be forseeable problems on virtual disks<br>
which will often be smaller than 8 GB and may be running CHS mode.<br><div><br></div><div>That'll be my penny to the pot for now.<br></div><div><br></div>PS. A standard sector is 512 bytes. Bigger sectors, e.g 1kB, have been used<br>
in the past to increase capacity, but are _very_ unusual since they require<br>proportionately higher bit frequencies on the media and are error-prone.<br><div><br></div><div>Best Regards<br></div><div>// Love</div><br>