Hard drive for a Pentium 100 ?

cyclistca

Platinum Member
Dec 5, 2000
2,885
11
81
My dads running a Pentium 100:Q. He keeps complaining that he has no disk space let so I was thinking about buying him a hard drive for Christmas. I figure because it's such an old system that there's probably a limit on how big a hard drive it can handle.

specs

Pentium 100
Windows 95
Memory between 16 and 32 MB
Hard drive < 1 Megs
CD rom

Sorry he's on the other side of the country so that all I can remember off the top of my head.

Yes he should really buy a new computer but he's 71 years old and not into this whole change thing. Gee it took me two years to get him to upgrade it from 3.1 to 95.

 

Odoacer

Senior member
Jun 30, 2001
809
0
0
He has more memory than hard disk space :Q

I think the limit lies within the motherboard itself, not the pentium... i think its around 6 gigs or something like that (maybe 2 if it doesnt support large disk drive-formatting).
 

veryape

Platinum Member
Jun 13, 2000
2,433
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Yes, it definitely depends on the motherboard, but since he is running a Pentium 100 i'm inclined to believe that he is not limited as you might think. I have an old Pentum 100 rig I use as a spare and I run my 15 gig Maxtor on it. Now getting it to run above ATA33 is another story.

BTW, in order for your dad to use a hard drive larger than 8.8 gigs he will definitely need to update his bios to the latest his mobo manufacturer has avaliable. Hope this helps.
 

Colt45

Lifer
Apr 18, 2001
19,720
1
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there is drive overlay programs too.. so you can use as big a hardrive as you want.. but only as fast as the mobo supports..... pio4?
check out ontrack.. they had a decent drive overlay progam last time i checked.. but try fdisking a new dirve without it first to see how much of the drive the mobo will support.
 

Belegost

Golden Member
Feb 20, 2001
1,807
19
81
Umm... I run a p90 with linux for fun, and it will not work with anything over ~2GB without using software to emulate. The top three ideas I have:
Find a 2GB drive
Get a 6.4GB (the largest most p100 mobos will support with software, AFAIK)
Buy an add-on IDE controller.
I think the last option is probably best. Though I have run into one problem with a newer PCI soundcard not working on the older PCI standard.
 

Thor86

Diamond Member
May 3, 2001
7,886
7
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Buy an ide controller card and you can use up to 120 gigs per disk.
 

heartsurgeon

Diamond Member
Aug 18, 2001
4,260
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i gave one of my kids a old p133 (win 95) and added a 10 gig western digital drive - you then have to partition the drive into multiple 2 gig drives
resulting in 5 drives (but it works)!