Hello Jim,

Thursday, November 18, 1999, 2:22:59 PM, you wrote:

JW> Mike,

JW> As I recall, that FAT16 partition must occur somewhere within the 1st 1024
JW> cylinders on the drive in order to function properly as a boot drive and
JW> active partition. In short, the FAT16 partition should be in the 1st 2 GIG
JW> of the drive.

I think you mix two things here : first 1024 cyl. of the drive usually
aren't same than 1st 2 G of the drive.

The 2 GIG limit occurs because of a bug in DOS/WIN95 MBR which will not
boot correctly if _start_ of the partition is above the first 2G. The
patched MBR is available, however I didn't check it out.

After first 1024 cyl., the information can only be reached via sector
number since the 16 bit record of head+cylinder+sector can't address
it directly and LPH (large placeholder) is used to mark that this
record is invalid. Older OS may incorrectly interpret the record...
        I had to reformat my drive and am still having a weird
        partitioning error which couldn't be solved by PCBUILD
        (been posted) - doesn't affect performance but shows up
        on N&B's Disk Minder, occured as a result of using old
        Partition Magic, version 4.
... and could damage the data. As of now I don't know of any OS that can
boot from a partition located "after" 1024th cylinder.

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