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