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Large HDD in an old computer question

C

chevelle396

Golden Member
ok, my neighbor's hard drive just died and it's too old to be RMA'd. he wants a new one but is afraid to get a large one because "the chipset might not support it". he's so sure of this that he's got me doubting myself. now I'm pretty sure that the operating and file systems are what you need to worry about in terms of the computer recognizing the size of a disk (IE: large disk support in fat32), not the chipset. He's got some old custom pc with a 233mhz p2 or something in it. personally i think he should build an entirely new computer, but it's not my money.

so, am I ignorant when it comes to older hardware or do I need to go straighten my neighbor out?
 
well, if he gets a PCI controller card with its own BIOS, he could boot a 160gb hard drive on any machine, as long as it was plugged into the controller card..

likely his bios supports up to a 32gb drive natively. most boards have a bios update available online to knock that up to 137gb (or more). find out what board is in there, (FCC id can be helpful here, if it has one), and see if a BIOS update exists for it. if so, all good, if not, get a controller card..

Maxtor retail boxed 7200rpm drives sometimes come with a free ATA133 PCI controller, which would be a perfect package for what you wnat to do here.


ebaycj
 
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