How Big of a Hard Drive Can I Use?

[2marshall8]

Here's my situation. I'm working on an old IBM Aptiva 486DX4 100mhz. for a friend of mine and their Hard Drive is only 700 mb. Well as u know this is like nothing now adays and it only has around 12mb free. This causes a problem for Virtual memory and running programs. So I need to upgrade the Hard Drive to something like a 2gb. My question is how large of a hard Drive can I get? They're running Win95 so It's a least FAT16. Now I thought the limit for FAT16 was like 2 or 8gb but I'm not sure. There's also the issue of if the BIOS can handle a larger HD. So what should I do to find out how high I can upgrade?

thanks
marshall

[muchmark]

The fact that you have a 700 MB HD indicates to me that your mobo supports LBA which means it will support a 2.2 GB drive. beyon that you will have to get the a BIOS flash, very few 486 mobo support HD over 2.2 GB. Get the Aptiva model number and look for a BIOS upgrade.

[Rocketmech]

Check your bios supports LBA mode for the HDD in the CMOS Setup. If it does then it will sometimes support up to 8.4gb , if it only supports Large mode then max is 1gb, I think.

[2marshall8]

Originally posted by Rocketmech
Check your bios supports LBA mode for the HDD in the CMOS Setup. If it does then it will sometimes support up to 8.4gb , if it only supports Large mode then max is 1gb, I think.

Will it say that LBA or Large Clearly? Also what does this sometimes mean when u say it will support upto 8.4 gb. How would I know if it would work?