[LinuxBIOS] 2 Terabyte Limit of BIOS/MBR

[Stefan Reinauer]

* jakllsch at kollasch.net <jakllsch at kollasch.net> [080111 03:47]:
> > how I understand the different articles at wikipedia, ms and different
> > netsources the BIOS just can't handle disks that are larger than 2TB, in
> > turn this renders a MBR unusable. Fine so I convert the disk to a GPT and
> > off I should go. But I found that the bios of this board still refuses to
> > accept the disk (reported as an scsi device from the controller) and just
> > says "No BIOS disk found".
> 
> Well, you're distorting some things there.  The BIOS itself
> just provides functions for disk access, and by itself, is
> incapable of understanding partition tables.
 
While I thought this initially, I now believe this is not exactly true.
Many systems are nowadays installed in a way that the MBR does not
contain the bootblock code, but instead points to an active primary
partition that contains the partition bootblock. This implies that the
BIOS knows how to parse the MBR and run the partition bootblock.

Stefan

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