Hello,

Although the situation described here occurred with a Pentium system, I
believe it to be relevant:

I have found, with systems as new as Packard Bell P100, that having the
LBA mode enabled can actually cause problems with a hard drive.

My experience is as follows:

When I attempted to install the 4 gig drive, the system (PB Pentium 100,
16MB RAM, 8/95 Bios, Original HDD 1.2 Gig) would not see it.  No matter
how many times I attempted to install it with LBA, it would not work.  I
gave up for a while.

When I finally had time to fiddle, I put the drive in and set the BIOS
Drive settings for "User Defined", and fiddled with the settings, but
using the correct # of heads, until I got the closest drive capacity to
what was on the drive label.

The system recogized the drive, I formatted and FDISK'd and it worked
fine for 2 months, when I moved the drive back to my main system.

***The bad news: When I migrated the drive back to my main system, the
format was unreadable. I had to reformat.  So if you plan to move it
from system to system, this method may not suit you.

Kim Hillyer

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