| RayeR CZ, 27.04.2026, 22:45 (edited by RayeR, 27.04.2026, 22:56) |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes (Users) |
I just upgraded my old 1TB HDD to 4TB (beside a SSD for system, attached to intel P67 onboard SATA 3.0 controller in IDE mode). I like to have most of the capacity accessible for my legacy OSes (DOS, Win9x, NT, XP...). On old 1TB I had nonLBA ext. partition with logical drivers that is accessible in MS-DOS 6.22 and the rest was big FAT32. Now I hit the 2TB barrier of MBR. But I wonder that I hit even lower. Neither FD-FDISK nor WinXP disk manager is able to create partition larger than 1,6TB. WTF? Why not the whole 2TB? Then I found that is seems my BIOS is too stupid to report limited EDD capacity that then fools the FDISK and even the Windows (I would expect WinNT/XP use their own disk drivers and don't rely on EDD values. Here is it: --- |
| mceric Germany, 28.04.2026, 01:35 @ RayeR |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
Hi! --- |
| bretjohn Rio Rancho, NM, 28.04.2026, 03:04 @ mceric |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> As people already started to work on this, I suggest to contribute to DOS |
| Laaca Czech republic, 28.04.2026, 05:08 @ bretjohn |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
But there are people which use hybrid MPR/GPT partitioning. --- |
| RayeR CZ, 28.04.2026, 17:28 @ Laaca |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> But there are people which use hybrid MPR/GPT partitioning. --- |
| Rugxulo Usono, 29.04.2026, 05:23 @ RayeR |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> But WinNT4 has some serious problem - |
| RayeR CZ, 29.04.2026, 20:09 @ Rugxulo |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> Win2000 was the first NT to support FAT32. So NT 4 is too old. --- |
| bretjohn Rio Rancho, NM, 28.04.2026, 17:30 @ Laaca |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> ... (maybe except partition boot flags) ... |
| Laaca Czech republic, 28.04.2026, 18:31 @ bretjohn |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
If I understand Rayer correctly he does not plan to use this 4TB disk for booting. He will boot from smaller disk and this one will be for data only. --- |
| RayeR CZ, 28.04.2026, 20:31 @ Laaca |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> If I understand Rayer correctly he does not plan to use this 4TB disk for --- |
| RayeR CZ, 28.04.2026, 17:21 (edited by RayeR, 28.04.2026, 17:33) @ mceric |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> In theory, int 13, ah=48h, dl=drive, ds:si pointer to buffer is supposed to --- |
| Zyzzle 29.04.2026, 01:39 @ RayeR |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> Now I hit the 2TB barrier of MBR. |
| bretjohn Rio Rancho, NM, 29.04.2026, 03:39 (edited by bretjohn, 29.04.2026, 04:21) @ Zyzzle |
Partitioning of 4TB HDD for legacy OSes |
> bret, when you say your USB utilities enable GPT partition reading in DOS, |
| RayeR CZ, 29.04.2026, 20:20 @ Zyzzle |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
I don't want to go via bigger sectors way - it's too trouble with many systems. Even the HDD pretend to use 512B sectors and no idea how to change it. It's viable for external USB drives where it's not problem to have bigger sectors... --- |
| ecm Düsseldorf, Germany, 29.04.2026, 20:56 @ RayeR |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
> --- |
| RayeR CZ, 30.04.2026, 17:31 @ ecm |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
I tried temporary switch to AHCI and it has different AHCI BIOS that supports EDD 3.0 and reports the correct value of total LBA sectors. WinNT4 with UniATA booted in AHCI mode without a problem bu they still see only 1,6TB so even when EDD fixed it is still truncated somewhere else so no need further EDD experiments... --- |
| ecm Düsseldorf, Germany, 30.04.2026, 20:06 @ RayeR |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
> I also tried to manually create another primary partition that fills the --- |
| Laaca Czech republic, 01.05.2026, 12:24 @ RayeR |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
Have you tried the HDAT2 program? --- |
| RayeR CZ, 04.05.2026, 17:48 @ RayeR |
some TSR/patch to modify BIOS/EDD? |
I'm a bit disappointed of various partition resizing tools (to expand existing FAT32 from 1,6TB to 2TB). I tried many ~10 tools and was surprised about the problems. Many of them just reported invalid partition or invalid size of current partition and so didn't allow to resize. Some others started resizing but hanged with zero disk activity after some time or ended with some error while partition (and data) left untouched. I run them under w7-x64 to have proper 64b arithmetics. The last I tried was Paragon Partition Community Edition x64 [ https://www.paragon-software.com/free/pm-express/# ] relative new SW - it resized the partition after cca 1/2 hour but screwed the data. Root dir looks fine but when I opened subdirs there was a garbage. Even it screwed my extended partition with FAT16 logical drives a crazy way they can be accessed under Windows and linux but DOS6/7 throws error when acesing them. Record in partition table seems OK. So I just going to wipe all that crap, repartition manually and load from a backup that takes several hours on such amount of data... --- |
| RayeR CZ, 07.05.2026, 15:40 @ RayeR |
failed with hybrid MBR under Windows |
Unfortunatelly my hybrid MBR attempt failed. Crucial problem is that Win7-x64 and XP32 (with W2k3 drivers) recognize GPT only if the MBR contains protective partition type EEh in the 1st partition table entry and the rest of part.table MUST be cleared to zeros. If there's added any other partition or if EEh partition is not located in the 1st entry then Windows just ignore GPT and use MBR instead. Only Linux can read such disk correctly prefering the GPT regardless other partitions in MBR. DOS itself seems has no problem with EEh partition, just ignore it, old fdisk show unknown partition. --- |
| bretjohn Rio Rancho, NM, 07.05.2026, 22:36 (edited by bretjohn, 07.05.2026, 23:45) @ RayeR |
failed with hybrid MBR under Windows |
This site contains a little bit of info on the various partition types that can be in an MBR: |
| RayeR CZ, 09.05.2026, 18:16 @ bretjohn |
failed with hybrid MBR under Windows |
I know that hybrid MBR is some kind of grey zone, just hoped it would work well as under Linux. To precise previous observation about Win7, I found that they probably checks only one Byte of MBR partition entry - the partition type. If I zero this Byte for remaining 3 partition entries (leaving CHS and LBA values in place) then Win7 recognizes valid GPT. So instead of swapping whole MBR it would be enough to just change these 3 Bytes... --- |
| RayeR CZ, 11.05.2026, 07:47 (edited by RayeR, 11.05.2026, 13:40) @ RayeR |
failed with hybrid MBR under Windows |
Oh sh... even worse with Win7 and hybrid MBR. I found that Windows is actively corrupting the GPT at LBA 2 (offset 400h) whenever I run command "attributes volume clear hidden" in diskpart - this is necessary to unhide my legacy MBR partitions because Windows hides automatically them at boot when detect hybrid MBR with EEh entry. So definitely not possible both legacy and GPT partition together. I hate this windows behavior to silently write something somewhere in a God/good intention. All that crap started by Win95 unexpectedly writting to floppies... --- |
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