P-133 with 60GB HD?

[gsiener]

Hey,
I have an old gateway Pentium 133, and wanted to make it into an mp3 server. I just bought a 60GB HD that I want to put in, will there be any problems as far as the BIOS is concerned, or anything else I should keep in mind?

Also, what OS do you think would serve best for this purpose?

Thanks so much,
Graham

 

[NelsonMuntz]

A BIOS that old is probably not going to recognize a drive of that size. I think they max out at 32 Gb or something like that. You can look for a BIOS update to fix the problem, but don't hold your breath...

 

[konichiwa]

The BIOS may have a 2GB limit because it is probably a very old chipset. To be honest with you I don't know how to go about getting around this. The first time I had a problem with this was with a WD drive and WD provided a utility on a floppy disk that was essentially a workaround...I'm sure someone else can help you...

 

[SirWoj]

Depends on the motherboard and the bios. I think most of the old pentium class motherboards might have trouble recognizing that size hard drive. Check the specs on the manufacturers web site. The driver/BIOS disk that came with the drive may help too.

I've been trying to build an mp3 server myself, and I've tried WinNT/2000 and linux. I like the Snowcrash plug-in for winamp, as it lets you control winamp from a remote computer. It has a cool interface too. Now I like the Globecom Jukebox for linux, even though I haven't been able to set it up corectly yet. Check out Freshmeat for other linux jukeboxes. Hope that helped!

 

[bacillus]

if the bios can't handle it then I would get a pci controller card for the hdd instead of mucking around with drive overlay software!

 

[JesusCow]

how much ram? linux would be nice, but win2k if you dont want to use linux

 

[majewski9]

A bios upgrade wouldn't hurt! Get an ata controller card also. I don't know if you'll be able to use all of that 60gigs. There is only way sure fire way to find out though! Also a drive that large might be to much for the syste3m power supply. See how many watts your psu is. You'll probaly be fine unless you add more cards or drives.

 

[wfbberzerker]

i dont know if you can flash a bios that old, lol

also, if you aren't able to convert the drive to fat32 file system, youll have problem. most old computers are fat16 (i think), which means they have a limit of 2gb hard drives. it depends on your operating system. i think.... either win95 or win98 and anything above those uses fat32.

 

[datallah]

Of course you can flash bioses that old (if you get the new BIOS for them) i flashed my 486DX2 system at the time and worked just fine. Another option to think about in order to get the drive working is software support. There are packages like EZ-Drive that will trick your BIOS into making the big drive work when it isn't supported by the system. I donno if this will work for sure, but i used something like that to put a 12 Gig Bigfoot (in 1997) into my old P-233.

 

[gopunk]

<< how much ram? linux would be nice, but win2k if you dont want to use linux >>


win2k on a p-133 might not be so hot.

 

[TheOverlord]

id go with an add on card, a promise 66 or 100 type. if you have at least 128mb ram try win2k, but more than likely you'll have to go with linux or maybe even NT4