[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Bryan Gurney]

On Fri, 05 May 2006 06:35:46 -0400, Don Y <dgy at DakotaCom.Net> wrote:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Thu, 04 May 2006 @ 19:03 -0400, der Mouse said:
>>
>>>> and your problem has nothing to do with PCs in general.
>>> In theory, no.  In practice, yes.  In theory, there is no need for a
>>> BIOS to misbehave like that.  But if some large fraction of them do -
>>> and I consider that vendor's comments as fairly strong evidence that
>>> they do - then it's a case of "99% of them give the rest a bad name".
>>
>> PC BIOS sucks, but the problem you are having hasn't been on any system I've
>> bought in the last 5 years.
>
> It seems to creep in every time there is a "quantum" size increase
> in disk capacities.  As if the folks writing this stuff can't
> learn from their past mistakes and do wide enough math, etc.

Yeah, there have been plenty of "glass ceilings" along the way:

33 MB (DOS FAT partition limitation IIRC)
520 MB (BIOS limitation)
8.4 GB (legacy INT13 limitation; solved by LBA)
128 GB (LBA limitation; solved by LBA48)
2.0 T (32-bit block numbering limitation (2^32 * 512k = 2.0 T) and MBR partitioning limit; solved by GPT)

Of course I'm leaving out a few of the Sun hardware ceilings that we've encountered in the Rescue list (SSA taking only 9 GB drives maybe, Sparcstation 5 maxing out with 18 GB drives).