3 ms·

I remember running into this back in the day on one of my Windows NT boxes. Knowing that NT only uses the BIOS during the boot process, I just installed NT on a

I remember running into this back in the day on one of my Windows NT boxes. Knowing that NT only uses the BIOS during the boot process, I just installed NT on a partition that was below the 8GB limit. Once the system booted the HAL communicated with the hardware directly and not through the BIOS. So it saw the full size of the drive, and I was able to create a second partition to use the full drive.

simcop2387 8y ago
Yep this was one of the reasons that a boot partition for linux and other operating systems became some common back in the early 2000s. Disks outpaced the hardware and a lot of them didn't support reading from further in on the disk. Operating systems could use drivers to talk directly to the hardware and then get around that limitation once booted but everything they needed to that point needed to be available early on.