Although MBR partition table usually does not support hard drives larger than 2TB, the structure of MBR partition table is more complex than GPT partition table which does not have this limitation. The complexity comes from several places:
1. The CHS(Cylinder,Head, Sector) of start sector/stop sector of a partition is ignored for modern hard drives. The Head field occupies 1 byte which can represent a max #255 header. The Cylinder field occupies 10 bits which can only represent #3ff(i.e.,#1023 in decimal) cylinder at maximum. The Sector field uses 6 bits and the maximum sector number it can represent is 63. Note that Cylinder number and Head number counts from 0, while Sector number counts from 1. The maximum sector number CHS can represent is #1023 cylinder, #255 head, #63 sector. Considering the fact that the sector size is 512 bytes in most cases, the maximum byte offset(counting from 0) of the last byte of the stop sector of a partition is 1024*256*63*512-1=8,455,716,863(~8GB). While modern hdds are far larger than 9GB, the start/stop CHS of a partition located beyond 9GB cannot be represented by CHS. But why the capacity limit of MBR hard drives is 2TB, not 8GB? That is because there are two additional fields: start LBA/sector number in the partition table entry. You can set the addressing mode of a hard drive to LBA(logical block addressing) in BIOS. Sectors of a HDD will be numbered from 0,1,…, to the last sector of the HDD. The start LBA is the sector number of the start sector of a partition; the sector number is its size. Considering both start LBA and sector number occupy 4 bytes, the maximum start LBA/size is 0xffffffff(4294967295) sectors,i.e.,2,199,023,255,040(2TB) in bytes. You may say the max stop byte offset of a partition can be (4294967295+4294967295)*512-1=4,398,046,510,079 so an MBR disk can be as large as 4TB. But in reality, the variables to store the address of a byte in an MBR partition are 4 bytes also so they can not address a byte beyond 2TB. This is the reason why MBR partition can not handle with HDDs larger than 2TB.
2. extended partition and logical drive. There are only 4 entries(slots) in the MBR partition tables which means you can create 4 primary partitions at most. If you want to create more than 4 partitions, you should create an extended primary partition, then create logical drives in the extended partition. An extended primary partition is nothing more than an ordinary primary partition in the MBR partition table, except its system type is set to 0xf. When you create logical drives in the extended primary partition, it will create Extra Boot Records(EBR) somewhere on the hard drive. Like MBR, EBR is also a sector of 512 bytes and contains its own partition table(4*16 bytes). However, there’re some differences between MBR and EBR. First, the first 446 bytes of EBR is set to zeros, in contrast to MBR which may contain bootstrap code. Second, only two entries are used in the partition table of EBR. One entry describes the actual logical drive you create, the other entry points to the next EBR and its system type is set to 0x5. The partition table entry of the extended primary partition points to the first EBR, so all the EBRS are chained together.
3. The start LBAs in the partition table entry with system type 0xf in MBR and the partition table entry with system type 0x5 in EBR have different meaning, which often causes confusion. Like other primary partitions, the start LBA of the extended primary partition is the sector number of the first EBR(or the starting sector of the primary partition). In other words, the start LBA of the primary extended partition is the sector offset to MBR(sector 0), and the first sector of the primary extended partition is used to store an EBR. But the start LBAs with system type 0x5 in EBRs are the sector offset of the next EBR to the start sector of the primary extended partition, neither the beginning sector of the whole HDD, nor the sector of current EBR. The is a broken to the normal start LBA definition,i.e., the offset to the boot record describing the partition,regardless of MBR or EBR. The start LBAs for the logical drives in EBRs, however, follow the normal definition, so if you want to calculate the absolute sector number of the start sector of a logical drive, you need to get its start LBA, then plus the absolute sector number of the EBR describing the logical drive, while the absolute sector number of an EBR is calculated by adding its start LBA (in the previous EBA) to the start sector of the primary extended partition.
4. The sector number field does not matter for the partition table entry with system type 0xf or 0x5 . Those partition table entries are just used to link the EBRs together using the start LBA field. The actual size of logical drives is represented in the corresponding entry in EBRs. Note that the logical drives are not necessarily adjacent to their EBRs. But in practice, they are usually aligned at the beginning sector of the next track to their EBRs or the beginning of next page(a page is 2048 sectors), i.e., the gap between the beginning of logical drives and their corresponding EBRs is typically 62 sectors or 2048 sectors. The piece of HDD space from the EBR to the end of the logical drive the EBR describe is called inner extended partition, and the size of this piece of HDD space(the size of logical drive plus the size of the gap) is put as the sector number field for the inner extended partition, although the value is not important. All the sizes of inner extended partitions are summed up and put as the sector number field of the partition table entry for the primary extended partition, which does not matter as well.
Reference:https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_tables-2.html