Hard Disc linking

"Peter" <peterfoxghost.DeleteThis@yahoo.ca> wrote in message news:7yvGe.6681$q23.1140806@news20.bellglobal.com...
> > Why would you want/need to have a cylinder limit?
> >
> > Is it a hardware issue or an OS issue.
>
> If you have an older system BIOS that does not address capacities over 2.1GB

Not necessarily a problem.

> (BIOS dated pre 1995,

> or if you are experiencing system hang conditions)

Right.

> you will need to close the 4092 cylinder limit jumper

Or 2 GB capacity limitation jumper. 4092 assumes a 16 head translation.

> in conjunction with your drive selection of Master, Slave or Cable Select.
>
>

Arno Wagner wrote:

> Previously J. Clarke <jclarke.usenet.TakeThisOut@snet.net.invalid> wrote:
>> Arno Wagner wrote:
>
>>> Previously nospam <nospam.TakeThisOut@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> Thanks everyone
>>>
>>>> Why would you want/need to have a cylinder limit?
>>>
>>> Simple: For software that was designed to stop working
>>> when a certain number of cylinders is exceeded. Some say
>>> this is simply lack of vision, but I strongly suspect
>>> that doing this type of coding in a mainboard BIOS
>>> serves to force the customer to buy new hardware.
>
>> Since the mainboard BIOS is bought from Phoenix or Award or AMI or one of
>> their competitors and not written by the mainboard manufacturer, this
>> doesn't seem to be a likely motivation.
>
>> One could argue that the 32-bit addressing limit in IDE was there to
>> "force
>> the customer to buy new hardware". In fact that limit is some 5,000
>> times larger than the largest drives on the market when IDE first
>> shipped, so it seems more likely that it never occurred to anybody that
>> PCs would ever have drives that big.
>
> Actually I expect it occured to lots of people, but they allways
> said, "what the hell, we can sell more Hardware/BIOS licenses
> that way if it does happen". I am not talking about the
> 32 bit limit, but also about the set of limits that came before
> it, which were many.

First, BIOS manufacturers don't sell to end users, so they would not be
likely to be selling new licenses as a result of the limits, and second the
only people running the kind of machines that were in existence when the
limits were established are a few hobbyists with a taste for antiques.

> Note that SCSI allways had 32bit sector addresses, even when PC
> disks were limited to ~500MB by the BIOS, so there definitely were
> people that expected these limits to be reached long ago. SCSI
> did add longer addresses also quite some time ago.
>
> Arno

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--John
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