LarryS

I think the limitation would be on the BIOS side of the motherboard's chipset and the HDD controller--if they support the HDD capacity--then Ghost will most likely not be the limiting factor!

And, I think you have the option of adding a add-on HDD controller card that could circumvent a BIOS limitation--but, I don't know the current details about that option.

The 137Gb figure comes from the old 28-bit IDE sector address limit (before disk manufacturers introduced 48-bit LBA commands to the ATA specifications). The reason the website says the rather vague "can do more" but doesn't quote an exact figure is that customers tend to take any number as a promise that something will work no matter what. The specific language used tells people who know what 48-bit LBA is that we support it, but doesn't give people who don't a stick to beat us with.

The simple fact is that if the website said the actual number, we know from bitter, bitter experience the result would be nasty complaints about "how we promised it would work" even when cloning Win2k (which didn't support >137Gb) on a machine with a BIOS that doesn't support >137Gb either.

Hence, the vagueness.

I believe the hard upper limit for Ghost 8.0 actually is 2Tb, which comes from the use of 32-bit addressing in some places (2^32 is a bit over 4 billion, times 2^9 or 512 bytes per disk sector) in various places internally, and given the sizes achievable (even with arrays) at the time I can't say for certain that it was actually tested with more than 1Tb. Moving to fully 64-bit addressing internally was done first, with the final changes to the .GHO format to use 64-bit addressing being one of the last parts of that process.

Current Ghost in GSS2 does (and has been tested with) arrays considerably over 2Tb, although that too requires some special conditions to work since the classic MBR doesn't support partitions starting beyond 2Tb.