Subj : Re: MS-DOS HDDs and partitions
To   : paulie420
From : StormTrooper
Date : Fri Apr 14 2023 08:52:17

 pa> I'm working w/ a 486 machine - it has a BIOS from 11/1992; all the HDD
 pa> options stop at 504MB unless you enter cylinder/heads/sectors.

Its a BIOS limit, not a DOS limit that you're seeing.  In order to bypass the DOS extender you'd need a more recent BIOS which would be hit and miss depending on whats on board on your 486.

When DOS boots it gets the boot information from BIOS, so if BIOS can't see more than 500Mb which was a hard limit for some time, DOS will only ever see that initially unless you load the extender to tell DOS about the rest of the space BIOS can't tell it about.

Spec

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

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