More than two hard disks in DOS

9 yuhong 1 8/5/2025, 11:19:27 AM os2museum.com ↗

Comments (1)

philipstorry · 51m ago
Quite the nostalgia blast for me!

I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.

If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.

Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.

OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!