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ON Wednesday, September 09, 1998 3:50 PM casey marion wrote:

I am going to upgrade a friend's computer.  He has a 486, running
Win95.  I want to put a FIC503+ and use his old HDD.
1) Will I run into problems with the HDD having been formated under an
older BIOS?
2) If so, can anyone recommend a work around?
Thank You,
Casey Marion

Casey,
You shouldn't.  In rare instances the FIC503 or any other modern BIOS
will auto-detect a drive with slightly different cylinder / heads/ sectors
than the original, much older motherboard.  This may result in the drive
being a different size than it was when originally partitioned and
formatted.  I have seen this with a Compaq Pressario. It is
always good to check.  Write down the specs for the drive on the 486
from CMOS before removing the drive, and if the FIC503 comes up
with different values, you have your choice of manually overriding the
auto-detect and typing in the numbers the 486 used, or repartitioning and
reformatting the drive.  As I have mentioned in an earlier thread, I
assume this would not happen if both motherboards had "good"
revisions of their respective BIOS, so maybe a BIOS update would have
worked as a third alternative when I have seen this in the past. I have
used the repartition method.
You should take care to see if the 486 was using any drivers for an IDE
adapter and remove them before you install the FIC503, since windows
should detect the on-board ide on the FIC503 when it first starts.
Tom Turak

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