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Therefore, the maximum disk size supported on disks using 512-byte sectors (whether real or emulated) by the MBR partitioning scheme (without 32-bit arithmetic) is limited to 2 TiB. [1] Consequently, a different partitioning scheme must be used for larger disks, as they have become widely available since 2010.
If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of the disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e).
The limit on partition size was dictated by the 8-bit signed count of sectors per cluster, which originally had a maximum power-of-two value of 64. With the standard hard disk sector size of 512 bytes, this gives a maximum of 32 KB cluster size, thereby fixing the "definitive" limit for the FAT16 partition size at 2 GB for sector size 512.
However, the common DOS style Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table only supports disk partitions up to 2 TiB in size. For larger partitions this needs to be replaced by another scheme, for instance the GUID Partition Table (GPT) which has the same 64-bit limit as the current INT 13h Extensions.
Since non-LBA-enabled versions of DR-DOS up to including 7.03 do not recognize the 0x0F partition type and other operating systems do not recognize the 0xC5 type, this can also be utilized to occupy space up to the first 8 GB of the disk for use under DR-DOS (for logical drives in secured or non-secured partitions), and still use 0x0F to ...
For most DOS-based operating systems, the maximum cluster size remains at 32 KB (or 64 KB) even for sector sizes larger than 512 bytes. For logical sector sizes of 1 KB, 2 KB and 4 KB, Windows NT 4.0 supports cluster sizes of 128 KB, while for 2 KB and 4 KB sectors the cluster size can reach 256 KB.
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Disk partitioning or disk slicing [1] is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. [2] These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk after a partitioning scheme is chosen for the new disk before any file system is created.