From: andyf@uk.sun.com (Andrew Fox - Sun UK - Answer centre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Big partitions on the PC emulator
Date: 21 Jan 1993 10:24:09 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Ltd.
Distribution: world
Reply-To: andyf@uk.sun.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: yama.uk.sun.com

In article 13183 ssudavss@csug.cs.reading.ac.uk (Captain_Kwok) writes:

>Yesterday I tried to set up a biggish partition on the PC Emulator 1.8.
>I told it to create a 90Mb C drive. This it did. I then created the partition
>from DRDOS 5 using FDISK and could happily read and write files to the DOS 
>drive from the PC emulator.
>
>When I tried to double click on the partition from RISC OS (A5000, 3.1 etc etc)
>after having quit the emulator software, I got an address exception and the 
>whole machine refused to do anything but it did not lock up (I have a feeling 
>that it killed the filer).
>
>Not being put off, I decided to try a 50Mb partition. Same problem!
>
>Eventually I got fed up and used a 25Mb partition which I knew worked.
>
>Is this a bug (or am I going MaD! *8-) ).

This is in fact a bug (well, sort of). I came across it about 2 months ago
when I got a bigger hard disk for my Archie. Up till then I'd had to suffer
the 40Mb IDE that comes with the A5000, so I'd never had enough room to create
a partition big enough to see the problem.

Basically, RISC OS 3 and 3.1 assume that the biggest PC partition you can create
is 32Mb. This comes about from the fact that early PC's could only have partitions
of 32Mb on hard disks. Obviously, things have progressed since then, but Acorn
have stuck with this limit. Why, I really don't know.

I have mentioned this limitation (bug?) to Acorn, but it seems unlikely that
a fix will be forthcoming in the short term. I suppose if enough of us complain,
then maybe something will be done.

You could also try !MultiFS, and see if that will read a partition bigger than
32Mb. Not particularly satisfactory, when the facility is supposed to be in the OS,
but better than nothing, if it works.

Andy.

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Xref: sparky comp.sys.acorn:10608 comp.sys.acorn.tech:1456