[rescue] SS 10 question and Ultra 10 question

[nate at portents.com]

> gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
>> 2. The first partition on the disk may have to be less than 8,000
>> megabytes
>>     (not 8192) but I am not sure, in order to boot from it.
>
> Yeah, that's a hard limit through OS9 iirc.  More specifically, the boot
> partition must reside entirely within the first 8000MB of disk surface.

That limit wasn't an OS limit at all - it's a limit of the built-in driver
for the IDE controller in certain Macs like the Wallstreet PowerBook,
platinum G3, and some early iMacs.

Use *any* other storage controller (SCSI, SATA, PATA) and there is no 8GB
boot partition limit.

Basically, it was a firmware bug that Apple let slip into production.

- Nate