Acronis os selector 8.0 User Manual

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does not matter if hard disks and other disk drives that are connected to the 
computer are visible to BIOS or not. 
When changing the structure of partitions it is necessary to make sure that 
the letters for the partitions where the swap file (\PAGEFILE.SYS) do not 
change, otherwise the system may become unbootable. 
2.10  Troubles Arising from Changing Letter Assignment 
Changing letters may damage your application setup. For example, let us 
suppose that you have installed several applications on a certain partition 
that at that moment had letter D: assigned to it. You have decided to create 
shortcuts to these applications so that it would be easy to run them under 
Windows 95. Every time you run an application via a shortcut, Windows 
addresses to the partition D: in order to find and run corresponding software. 
If the letter for this partition is changed, the shortcut will point to an 
incorrect partition, and Windows will be unable to find the software to run 
the application since now the letter D: is assigned to another partition. 
Changing partition letters usually affects all system configurations that are 
based on original partition letters. Those are usually the settings from 
AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, and several other 
configuration files, and also in Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000/XP 
system registry. 
Letter assignment usually changes when the following changes to the 
partition structure are performed: 
•  A partition is created. 
•  A partition is moved. 
•  A partition is deleted. 
•  An extra hard disk is plugged in. 
•  Some hard disk is unplugged. 
Some letter changes may be avoided by using our partition hiding function. 
Acronis OS Selector allows the hiding of any partition from any operating 
system. 
2.11  1024 or 4096 Cylinder Limit 
For a long time the main way to access hard disks was through BIOS, i.e. 
interrupt 13h functions. In order to read or write to a disk three bytes had to 
be passed containing cylinder number (10 bits), head number (6 bits) and 
sector number (6 bits), so that the hard disk size was limited to 2016 
megabytes. To overcome this limitation there was an attempt to use the 
leftover 2 bits, thus raising the maximum capacity to 8064 megabytes. But 
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Chapter 2 : Basic Information