To all people. What will happen if you are using a large disk on old motherboards that doesnt support large disk?

[Battousai01]

Hi guys! this is the story...

I have an old IBM Personal Computer, IBM PC 300PL model 6562-50J and the specification:

Pentium 233 Mhz. MMX
32MD EDO RAM
onboard video and sound

The IBM PC 300PL 6562-50J motherboard/bios has a maximum harddisk capacity of up to 8.4 Gigabyte and the IBM updated bioses has no fixes on using larger HDD so you are stuck on an 8.4 gig if ever you have one...

I tried installing a 20gig HDD which is partitioned to two (10 gig each) formated on a FAT32 system. I tried to install it and when I checked the CMOS/bios setup, the bios detected the drive as 8.4gig so I knew that the motherboard really doesnt support larger than 8.4gig HDD, but when I tried booting a startup or boot disk and go to DOS and went to drive C: and typed "dir" DOS showed me the first partitioned drive as 10gig... but when I tried to access the other partitioned drive (drive D it says "invalid drive specification" and when I tried installing Win98 and run scandisk, scandisk tells me that the final cluster of drive C: cant be read and that the bios' LBA settings arent right. So I concluded that the partitioned 20gig cant be read by the motherboard... (correct me if Im wrong)

and so I tried...

I tried installing a 1.2gig HDD with Windows98 in it and installed the 20gig HDD (partitoned to two) as a SLAVE DRIVE, Windows 98 detected it succesfully as two partitioned drive (Drives D: and E both 10gig each.. but whenever Im not on a Windows98 environment the 20gig cant be accessed (the other half I mean) so whats the reason?

whats the reason why Windows can still detect the drive (20gig) even the motherboard/bios doesnt support large disk??? and why cant you fully access the drive if your not in a Windows98 environment???



So what I did was copied the entire data including the Win98 installed on the 1.2gig HDD to the first partitioned drive of the 202gig HDD.. then installed the 20gig as primary master... after rebooting it I was able to use the 20gig!!! <-- the trick I thought of!

but whenever I run scandisk before Win98 it cant proceed cause scandisk cant detect the last clusters of drive C: you must then be at a Windows98 environment to have access on the entire 20gig HDD partitioned to two..

so my last question is... What will be the result if your using a large capacity harddisk on a computer/motherboard/bios that doesnt support large disk????

hope you guys can understand my story...

thnx!

P.S. this also goes to my other old computer (IBM PC 300GL)

 

[Zepper]

. Win 9x (and up) does not use the BIOS to access the hard disk once it's booted up. DOS does...
. It would be better to buy an add on adapter (about $20. for Silicon Image based PCI IDE/RAID adapter) so you can use the drive safely in DOS and Win.
. I would disable one of the on-board IDE channels in the BIOS to free up an IRQ for the add-on adapter. Then you will have three IDE channels on only two IRQs.
. Also see replies to: My hard drive has been formatting for over 12 hours thread in this section.
.bh.
:sun:

 

[13black]

I ran a 1 gig drive on an old 486 that wouldn't support it. It showed up as 512 meg, the old 1024 cylinder limit of the bios and dos. I eventually used ontrack disk manager to put a drive overlay on it so i could use the whole drive. What I found was that running the drive at 512 meg had ruined it. It was full of bad sectors. Using the wrong harddrive info in the bios had caused the heads to skew off track. I think most of the newer large harddrives come with a drive overlay program just for the situation you describe.

 

[bendixG15]

Few years ago, I installed a "large" Maxtor drive on a P233 system using Maxtor's EZ BIOS routines
which came with the drive just for this reason. (Updated versions were on their web site.)
I had no problems with the drive, but you are married to EZ BIOS (at least you were when I used it)
I don't recall the max disk size that the P233 BIOS supported, but it was less than the Drive I installed.