PCjs Machines

PC 10Mb Hard Drives

PCjs includes 10Mb drives in selected IBM PC XT, IBM PC AT, and COMPAQ DeskPro machines, because all machines support a 10Mb Drive Type with the following drive parameters:

306 cylinders
4 heads
17 sectors/track

yielding a capacity of 10,653,696 bytes (306 * 4 * 17 * 512), or 10.16Mb (since PCjs considers 1 megabyte to be 1,048,576 bytes).

Notes

The drive configuration file PC DOS 2.00 Formatted Disk (Empty) provides a completely empty disk. It was partitioned with the PC DOS 2.00 FDISK utility, allocating the entire disk to a single DOS partition, and then it was formatted with the PC DOS 2.00 FORMAT utility. Neither the FORMAT “/S” option nor the SYS command were used, so no system files were transferred, leaving the disk completely empty and unbootable.

After formatting, PC DOS 2.00 reports:

10592256 bytes total disk space
10592256 bytes available on disk

As explained in our DiskImage source code, in the BPB descriptions, a 10Mb “Type 3” PC XT fixed disk uses drive parameters of 306 cylinders, 4 heads, and 17 sectors/track, for a total of 20808 sectors or 10,653,696 bytes.

However, as page 1-179 of the PC XT Technical Reference Manual (April 1983) notes:

WARNING: The last cylinder on the fixed disk drive is reserved for diagnostic use.
Diagnostic write tests will destroy any data on this cylinder.

And this is confirmed by the PC XT BIOS, page A-94, in the code for the “GET PARAMETERS (AH = 8)” function:

C800:03B2 268B07        MOV     AX,ES:[BX]      ; MAX NUMBER OF CYLINDERS
C800:03B5 2D0200        SUB     AX,2            ; ADJUST FOR 0-N AND RESERVE LAST TRACK

By “RESERVE LAST TRACK”, they really meant “RESERVE LAST CYLINDER”, because 68 (not 17) sectors are reserved at the end of the disk. In addition, the first sector of the disk is reserved for the Master Boot Record (MBR), so there are a total of 69 reserved sectors. 20808 - 69 = 20739 sectors (0x5103), which is exactly what’s stored in the “total sectors” field of the disk’s BPB, yielding a total volume size of 10,618,368 bytes.

But that 69-sector overhead is not the end of the story. There is also overhead incurred by the FAT file system, which, in this case, consists of:

DOS Boot sector: 1
FAT sectors: 2 * 8 = 16
Root directory sectors: 32

for a total of 49 sectors, leaving 20739 - 49 = 20690 sectors. Moreover, free space is measured in clusters, not sectors, and the volume uses 8 sectors/cluster, leaving room for 2586.25 clusters. Since a fractional cluster is not allowed, another 2 sectors are lost, bringing the total FAT file system overhead to 51 sectors.

Thus, actual free space is (20739 - 51) * 512, or 10,592,256 bytes, which is exactly what DOS reports as the available space.

Some sources on the internet (eg, http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems) claim that the FAT file system overhead for the XT’s 10Mb disk is “50 sectors”. As they explain:

"The fixed disk has 10,618,880 bytes of raw space: 305 cylinders (the equivalent of tracks) × 2 platters
× 2 sides or heads per platter × 17 sectors per track = 20,740 sectors × 512 bytes per sector = 10,618,880
bytes...."

and:

"With DOS the only partition, the combined overhead is 50 sectors leaving 10,592,256 bytes for user data:
DOS's FAT is eight sectors (16 sectors for two copies) + 32 sectors for the root directory, room for 512
directory entries + 2 sectors (one master and one DOS boot sector) = 50 sectors...."

However, that’s incorrect. First, the disk has 306 cylinders, not 305. Second, there are TWO overhead values: the overhead OUTSIDE the partition (69 sectors) and the overhead INSIDE the partition (51 sectors). They failed to account for the reserved cylinder in the first calculation and the lost fractional cluster in the second calculation, and then they conflated the two values to produce a single (incorrect) result.