Someone please explain 2gb boot boundary

[jim.t]

As I'm understanding it, I have a 40gb HD that unpartitioned(c http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif. If I partition it into 2 parts(c & d), I can't make C: (primary/bootable) any bigger than 2gb(2gb boundary), but D: (or E:, extended/logical) can be as big as I want it to be. If that's about it, why doesn't C: (unpartitioned) fall under this rule...or am I just completely way off?

[Dave_H]

It sounds like your BIOS is not the problem otherwise you would never be "seeing" the entire drive.
It could be that your being limited by the type of format. FAT16 has a 2GB limitation.
During the Fdisk, if you choose "enable large drive support" you will be formatting in FAT32, and if your system's BIOS has large drive support you should have no limitations. (Of course your operating system must also support this).
An extended DOS partition can be any size, but when you get to the part were you create the logical drives within that partition, if there FAT16, your still going to get stuck at 2GB.
Hope that helps.
Dave

[sweets143]

okay, I undestand that there is a 2 gig limit on partitions on Fat16 but why is this? I am currently taking a class where we discuss this topic and I boosted that i could find out why. I am excellent at research but this one is throwing me becuase most people only know it exists and not the reason. Any answer would be welcome. Please email me.
Thanks

[Fingers]

FAT16 is an old format which came from the days of MS-DOS. Each entry in the table is 16 bits long and can have a maximum value of 2 to the 16th power. This means there cannot be many entries in the table (to be exact theoritically the maximum number of entries is 65536). As each entry corresponds to a cluster in the partition, the total number of clusters becomes limited. and this limits the size of a partition. To compensate for the size the clusters must be made large that means the chunks or units of storage becomes larger. FAT16 partitions cannot be larger than 2GB. The different clusters sizes for various partition sizes are given below. Larger cluster means more waste of space as there can be lot of wasted space.

Here's the entire article.

What is FAT16 and FAT32 (http://members.nbci.com/monirdomain/whatis.htm)

[sweets143]

you are beautiful my friend ... thanks