Can I use a large harddisk with operating systems other than DOS?
This is often less of a problem than with DOS, but some OSs don’t understand translation. With operating systems such as NetWare, Unix, Win/NT and OS/2, the only thing you need to use large ATA disks is a BIOS that allows specification of more than 1024 cylinders in the drive type setup. Since these OSs use the BIOS only when booting, the only consequence of not having an Enhanced BIOS is that boot managers, boot partitions etcetera have to reside below cylinder 1024. Once running, these operating systems use their own software to control the disks. That way, they are not subject to the BIOS’ restrictions such as the capacity limit. Unfortunately, this also means that if you have a translating EBIOS or software driver, the OS has to be aware of the translation scheme used, or conflicts will arise between the operating system and DOS/Windows. If you can set up partitions so that all DOS and boot partitions reside below the first 1024 cylinders (504MB), you can avoid translation altogeth
