On Thursday, August 27, 1998 9:08 AM Earl Truss wrote:

>>At 10:14 PM 8/26/98 -0400, you wrote:
>>I'm trying to install a Samsung 2.1Gb IDE drive in a 486/66 computer.
>>I eventually went ahead and ran scandisk and it started finding all bad (I
>>don't rember if it was sectors or clusters) after about 24% of disk was
>>scanned.

>There is a 528MB limit on older machines.  SInce this is about 24% of your
>2.1GB drive, I'd say this must be what you are seeing.  Perhaps someone can
>post more information on what to do about this?  I believe this is due to a
>limitation in the BIOS, which must be upgraded to correct this problem or
>you must use a "disk manager" program to intercept BIOS calls and manage
>the larger disk in place of the BIOS routines.

I hope you have your answer, there have been several good ones to this
thread so far. Here is one more thought:
Have you partitioned the drive and formatted it on the 486?  If you installed
into the 486 a disk that was partitioned on a different PC you may have a
problem like mine. My Compaq 486 likes to report one less cylinder than
my Pentium PC when the two different BIOS hard disk auto-detection
routines are run and compared against each other. This results in 516,000
fewer bytes reported on the Compaq.  I can get the space back by over-riding
the  auto-detect value for cylinders.  Keep in mind that cylinders times heads
times sectors times 512 equals the total formatted disk space. If you
are off by a little bit you get the bad last cluster problem.
Any BIOS that auto-translates and supports LBA will accept any cylinder
entry that does not result in a total that exceeds the physical disk space,
so you can subtract 1 or 2 cylinders to make the drive seem smaller to the
BIOS. It's important to repartition and reformat after doing this, that is why
using one BIOS to partition a drive that will run on a different BIOS
sometimes does not work.  It should work, but it doesn't always.  I suspect
that  my Compaq has a mild bug.
Tom Turak