Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:38:49 -0400 | Subject | Re: support for drives larger than 2TiB | From | Greg Freemyer <> |
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On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Yuhong Bao <yuhongbao_386@hotmail.com> wrote: > >> However, 2TiB limit is >> inherent in the BIOS programming interface and currently the only way >> to overcome it is using a completely different BIOS interface (EFI, >> that is). > Nope, look at the Int13 extensions, it already support 64-bit LBA. > > Yuhong Bao
64-bit LBA? I assume you meant 48-bit LBA from ATA-7. It will address up to PBs I believe. (KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, ....)
But I've seen lots of "48-bit LBA" supporting controllers that hit limits at 500GB, 1TB, etc. and needed new firmware updates.
Secondly, if you look at the table on the right of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record#Disk_partitioning you see that the starting sector of a partition is defined with a 32-bit value.
ie. 2TB with 512 byte sectors.
The normal solution is to move to a GPT which requires EFI if you want to boot from it.
Greg
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