>
> Oh I don't know... It'll probably work.
>
>> There are many hurdles that you'll encounter. Firstly, you'll need a
>> hard drive that's small and old enough that MS-DOS will actually be able
>> to use it.
>
> I suspect so long as it isn't native 4K sectors, it'll just be reported
> as 2GB.

No.  The boot drive had to have a primary partition that is less than 
2GB, and fits entirely below cylinder 1023 or else DOS won't understand 
it.  You also need a special driver that loads before IO.SYS in order to 
fake the number of heads and cylinders because it doesn't understand LBA 
mode.  This has been the case as far back as drives that had more than 
1GB of space (Anyone remember OnTrack Disk Manager?), since it usually 
meant more than 1024 cylinders, as you couldn't fit more than 2 platters 
in a regular drive bay.

>> So why is the PC architecture dragging all the useless stuff for MS-DOS
>> compatibility, when nobody's running MS-DOS anyway?
>
> No idea. Presumably because it would mean changing stuff?

You can rest assured that somewhere, there's a nuclear reactor or a 
stock-exchange trading application, or an airline flight scheduler or 
something of the sort that still relies on a DOS based controller, ans 
as long as this exists, no hardware maker is going to risk stopping 
support for it for fear of losing business.

Heck, I just saw today that IBM still officially releases JREs of its 
own flavor of Java for OS/2 Warp.  There mu$t be a good rea$on for it.


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