hard drive - how big???

[bairdy]

I have a mobo in my second P.C. which I want to up grade the hard disk. The mobo manual says that It will support HDD's up to 8.4 gig. As HDD's of this size are getting a bit tricky to get hold of can I put a bigger one in and getthe system to recognise the full size of the HDD??

Cheers

Bairdy

[Bovon]

A bios upgrade for the motherboard probably will allow a larger hard disk to be recognized. The hard disk manufacturers supply a disk manager that also allows a larger disk to be used. This is done by sorta fooling the mainboard bios into believing the disk is of the correct size.

The disk managers are owned and patented by Dynamic Drive Overlay Company, commonally called, 'DDO'. This puts an overlay on the disk before anything is loaded to the disk.

Dynamic Drive Overlay leases the rights to individual disk manufacturers, which in turn modify the code to work with their specific drive. If someone wanted to, they could buy a copy of DDO from the company, and that works with all drives.

[Ed_S]

Do a bios flash upgrade if at all possible.

Unless they've changed drastically, drive overlays should be a last resort. While they DO work, keep in mind that they can be VERY hard to get rid of later, if you ever upgrade the MB or move the drive to a different machine.