More than two hard disks in DOS
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More than two hard disks in DOS
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Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#2Quite the nostalgia blast for me!
I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.
If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.
Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.
OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#3Quite the nostalgia blast for me! I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either. If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers…
I had added a 2nd disk on my 386sx, but I guess it was after the DOS 5.0 time. I did not realize before v5 it was not allowed.
Not long afterwards I ended up on Coherent OS, fun times.
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#4Quite the nostalgia blast for me! I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either. If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers…
And expensive, really expensive.
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#5Quite the nostalgia blast for me! I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either. If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers…
And expensive, really expensive.
I was gonna say, "MORE THAN TWO HARD DISKS? IN THE DAYS OF DOS?! Anything else we could get for you, your majesty?"
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#6Quite the nostalgia blast for me! I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either. If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers…
There were also MFM and RLL hard drives. I don't recall if they were pre-IDE or something different altogether. It's been a long time.
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
And expensive, really expensive.
I was gonna say, " MORE THAN TWO HARD DISKS? IN THE DAYS OF DOS?! Anything else we could get for you, your majesty?"
I have piles of old, but still functioning HDs now. I was looking at them yesterday and thought about how cheap these things have become.
I had to save up to buy floppies in the 80s!
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#8If 640 KiB of RAM was all anybody would ever need, what were they going to do with more than two hard disks?
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#9> ... was missed for years simply because no one had a PC with more than two hard disks.
Thats a hardware limit:
Early mainboards only had a single IDE / parallel ATA port. Each port has two pins for drive select, so you had a maximum of two addressable drives, the master and slave drive.
With a secondary ATA port you got another set of master/slave, pushing the limit to 4 drives.
That's where the "primary master" text comes from that showed up on the screen during booting.
Re: More than two hard disks in DOS
#10Quite the nostalgia blast for me! I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either. If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers…
> before SATA we had IDE
I had the original IBM PC with two 5.25" floppy drives, and I think that was all the room there was on the disk controller. Dad bought a 10MB Hardcard to expand it; that went in an ISA slot, if I remember correctly. The disk controller might have been in an ISA slot, too.
I think that pre-AT era would have constrained DOS <5.0 more than the IDE/SATA/SCSI eras.