On 30 Jul 98 at 11:44, Brad Britton wrote:

> I am going to buy a new hard drive. My BIOS is a few years old. I have
> a 4.3 GB drive which it recognizes fine. I am wondering, if I get a 6.4
> GB drive, and the BIOS doesn't recognize it,

  The boundary points I'm aware of are around 500MB, 2.1GB, and
8.3GB.  A system that works with a 4.3GB drive should work just fine
with a 6.4GB as well.  [Various OS formats have maximum *partition*
sizes, but that's a separate issue.]

> will I still be able to use as much of the drive as it does recognize?

  Yes.  The kicker to this is that some systems that had trouble at
2.1GB would only recognize space *beyond* that limit, so a 2.1GB
drive looked like 400MB.

> Another question. Would it be better if I get a controller card to
> recognize large hard drives?  I know that if I get a controller
> card, there will be more code to fit in the upper memory area.
> Would that be a possible source of conflict?

  "Upper memory" is strictly a DOS phenomenon.  I wouldn't worry
much about this one, unless perhaps you have some old games that want
600K of conventional memory to run.  [I multi-boot to DOS 6.22 on a
FAT16 partition for these, and use the ROM BIOS instead of a special
driver.

> One more question please: Even if my BIOS does recognize a 6.4 GB
> drive, would  a good controller card help to speed up my system? If
> that is the case, are there any recommendations on which make, model
> of card I should use? I would like more speed, but not at the risk
> of instability or other problems.

  The most obvious difference that a controller card can make is
additional caching.  "Promise" is the name to look for in that area.
  The other possibility you might have in mind is SCSI -- a whole
different world.

> I have a 133 MHZ (actually I have a 166 MHz chip, but the
> motherboard only goes up to 133) Pentium, with an HX chipset.

  The 133 top limit sounds like a Socket 5 rather than Socket 7
board; I didn't know there were any with HX chipset!  I can't seem to
find any specs for such a board on the web.  [Can you tell us what
kind of board it is?]

David G