Well its all spelled out on the microsoft site http://support.microsoft.com/kb/118335 The 2-GB partition limit is imposed by the maximum number of clusters and the largest cluster size supported by the FAT file system. The FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 2 GB. This is just like that 32768 number just discussed, it is FAT16 because it's 16-bit addessing (2 to the power of 16). Sixteen bits times the max number of clusters is 2GB. >From The FAT16 Partition Size (2.00 GB / 2.15 GB) Barrier If you put a hard disk over 2 GB into a machine that is using regular FAT (16-bit FAT) under DOS, Windows 3.x or the first version of Windows 95, you can use all of it--assuming that you aren't limited by one of the other BIOS-related barriers mentioned in adjacent sections. However, to access the full contents of the disk, you must partition it into multiple peices. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB2-c.html Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2) and Windows 98 support two new partition types (0B and 0C) to support the FAT32 file system. That isn't really DOS ... it's Win9x OSR2. DOS did not support FAT32. It only supported FAT16. If you make a bootable disk from Win95 OSR2 or Win98, that's not DOS. -- Doug
