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To: speedrazor who wrote (22519)	11/14/1997 11:11:00 PM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 30240

Actually, Sean, the 2.1 gig limitation is in the operating system, not the hardware. The file allocation table in Windoze95 Rev A and DOS (therefore, Windoze 3.11 and earlier, as well) is 16-bit. A 16-bit FAT can only store allocation information for 2.1 gig worth of disk space. I don't recall the math exactly, but if memory serves, it's 65,536 (2 ^ 16) address entries for clusters of 32768 bytes each. Someone correct me on this if I don't have the numbers quite right. Later versions of Windoze, as well as Novell Netware and OS/2's HPFS use more than 16 bits for the FAT, giving them a much larger address space. The 540-meg limit you're remembering actually was somewhat hardware-related. The BIOS in earlier machines wasn't equipped to handle more than 1024 (2 ^ 10) tracks on a platter side. There was a comparable limitation on the number of heads and the number of sectors per track. This worked out to just over 500 meg of capacity that the old BIOS could understand. That's where DiskManager comes in. It patches the BIOS at bootup in ways I don't really understand. The end result is that it increases the number of tracks/sectors/heads the BIOS thinks the hard drive has. With DiskManager (or the capabilities built into any newer BIOS), the limits are raised much higher. I don't know what that limit is off the top of my head, but it's high enough that FAT16 becomes the next hurdle.