20 GB drive in legacy?

[Dennis]

So my wife got me a brand new 20 GB drive (Fujitsu MPF320AT) for Christmas - something to play with in one of my legacy "toy" computers. She was tired of me upsetting our "good" (400 MHZ) machine that we both use every day for work. This particular legacy is an early Pentium, 166 MHZ, 96+K memory, don't know the ID of the mother board, running early version of Win 98, have all kinds of other things crammed into the old maxi-tower case. Problem is I can't get the thing to recognize any more than 8.03 GB of space on the new drive, and in some cases it only formats to 255 MB!? Wondering if that is a function of the bios (AMIBIOS 1992 VER 1.00.04.CBO). If so, can I upgrade it? If so, how? Is it chip replacement or can it be re-programmed? If not, any other ideas?

Thanks!

D.A.M.

[wahrez]

Some early mobo's could only handle small hard drives because the operating system could only handle small drives, this is a function of the disk controller, which won't see beyound a certain size of the hard disk.

Before you go any further check to make sure you've got the drive configured properly in the BIOS.

There are two possible way around this, firstly you can use a program which loads into the boot-sector of the drive and controls the drive using software, I've just checked out the Fujitsu site for you and they use OnTrack. (which I used to use with my 486 back in the mid-nineties to control my 2GB hdd...I ran it for about 4 years with the software and it was very reliable!)

Get the file and info here: http://www.fcpa.com/cgi-bin/goFrames.cgi/support/su_driver_hd.html

Alternatively you can buy a disk controller card to run the drive from.

Good luck!

[Dennis]

AaaaHAaaa! Found the answer on another post... on this forum of course. Apparently I have two problems - ons is my legacy BIOS that won't allow more than 8.4GB, and the other is my less-than-new version of Win 98 that also won't allow more than 8.4GB of HDD.

In case anyone wants to know more, there is good info at http://www.ping.be.bios and a good article at http://www.ibm.com/storage/harddrive

Guess my next step is to load a newer version of Win 98 (4.00.950B) and try to replace / reload / flash my old BIOS. I'll probably try those repairs before using a third-party patch program. Why patch when you can repair?

D.A.M.

[stylin19]

The problem can be as much with the FDISK version, as with the Bios or OS. plus a restrictions with FAT16 vs FAT32.

Here's a decent detailed document from MS:
Windows Support for Large Hard Drives (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q126/8/55.ASP)

looks like you are on track. FYI.. 4.00.95b is a Win95 version, not a Win98 version. (Win98 versions start 4.10.xxx)..have fun, good luck