old BIOS question/ isnt this weird?

[dbwillis]

I picked up 5 PC's about 2 weeks ago from an out of business sale
(2) Dell P75t towers, (2) Dell P100t towers, (1) Dell 575 desktop

Ive been scrapping the PC's and have ended up with a Dell P100t, 100mhz, 128MB (72 pin) tower.
Im going to use it as a file server for my home and printer sharing as well.

I was thinking that the BIOS (dated 1995) wouldnt be able to handle a big (20+GB) drive.
I put win2k pro on it and plugged my WD 80GB drive into the secondary IDE as master and it sees the entire 80GB drive, formatted it and it seems fine.

Is this possible? As far as I can tell the BIOS wasnt upgraded and the hard drive (100% sure) does not have any overlay software.
It just confuses me that the whole drive is recognized by the old BIOS.
Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[subflava]

That is really weird...I've heard of motherboards with BIOS from like 2000 that wouldn't recognize a 40GB drive. Go figure.

 

[dbwillis]

Yeh, thats weird, I really dont want to put alll my important data on the drive and have it crap out.
Maybe tonight Ill copy a few CD's onto the C drive and make a 2GB ZIP file and copy it to the drive about 30 times to fill it up and see what happens.

Checkdisk finds no problems with it either.

--weird

 

[Iron Woode]

Did you use a 3rd party program to format this drive? The retail maxtor drives come with MaxBlast floppy for formatting and other stuff. Included is a disk managment program called EZ bios that allows large drives to be installed in old PCs that can't normally recognize them. Just curious.

 

[dbwillis]

Nope, partitioned/formatted in Disk Management in windows 2000 pro.

 

[Jeff7]

I have a 386 motherboard here that is fully Y2K compliant, leap year and all. I guess some manufacturers actually designed things with the future in mind.

 

[dbwillis]

Hey, whats :>


If you post any variation of I'B'T'L again, you will be O'B'T'L.

AnandTech Moderator

?? Im curious at what that stands for

 

[Iron Woode]

Hey, whats :>
If you post any variation of I'B'T'L again, you will be O'B'T'L.

AnandTech Moderator

?? Im curious at what that stands for

Well the I is in and the L is lock. I think the rest is easy to guess.

 

[dbwillis]

Thanks for the tip...think I need a coffee