Are you asking a question in regards to a particular computer system
or
OS release?
The limitation comes mainly from, at least in the Mac world,
non-support for 48 bit LBAs (logical block addresses) in the disk
drive
controller and/or the ATAPI bus controller (or its firmware) used on a
particular system. All mac systems made since late 2000 or early 2001
should have hardware support for drives greater then 128GB/130GB
(depending on units being used) when attached via ATAPI buses (note
firewire interfaces, etc. never had this particular limitation).
Also Mac OS X (Darwin) system supports very very large disks (and I
believe it always has). Also the HFS+ file system that Mac OS X uses
(Mac OS 8 & 9 used it as well by default IRCC) supports huge volumes
as
well... as default configured 64 TB in size I believe
(<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html>).
I am asking the question in regards to an old G4 tower.
I forget when they initially came out, but I think 2000 does not seem
unreasonable.
It is particularly annoying as OpenBSD 3.6 on the same machine handles
it as a 200Gb drive.
The question was initially posed to shortcut my covering the HFS+
documentation again.
What version of Mac OS X are you using on it? It looks like Mac OS X
10.2 and later has a partitioning tool that can support creating
partitions/volumes greater then 128GB. I think this is a separate issue
from the 48b LBA support I was more talking about.
