At 12:09 AM 2/3/1998 Roxanne Pierce wrote:
>
>Oh, PLEASE don't use OnTrack or any of the disk overlay softwares!
> . . . .
>
>I do have a recommended solution.  Several manufacturers make I/O EIDE boards
>that plug in to your "old" system and that have the upgraded BIOS right on
the
>board that *will* recognize and deal with these large drives -- regardless of
>whether your motherboard does or not.  Promise Technology is top-notch, and
>makes several different flavors of these boards.  Many, if not most, of their
>solutions to the large hard drive problem cost less than $50 or $60 --
which is
>a lot less than you'll pay someone like me to figure out how to get that
>software off later on down the road.
>
> . . .


Just one additional note:

I'd almost always recommend a motherboard swap if you are
looking at a $50+ expense to overcome a limitation of the
motherboard BIOS.

Decent branded motherboards start at $60 wholesale. Then
you also get (with the LBA): a more modern BIOS with better
features, modern chipset, probably a larger, faster L2 cache,
faster Pentium CPU w/ MMX upgrades, USB support, IRa
support, high speed serial ports, etc.

I'd recommend Roxanne's solution if you cannot replace the
motherboard (i.e., proprietary motherboard/case), or you have
too many legacy components (i.e., more than 4 essential ISA
cards and 30-pin SIMMs) and a very limited budget.

As Roxanne does, I ALWAYS recommend a hardware
solution rather than a software solution (i.e., the aforementioned
I/O card or new motherboard rather than Ontrack; or a new hard
drive rather than Stacker . . .).  You get more value for your
money and you don't buy into the software's other limitations
or require support to cure software problems.

Moreover, with Ontrack and other specialized partition software,
your older utilities and other software will have difficulties reading
the drive. You need a special boot disk to boot with a floppy, so
your standard boot disk with utilities has to be modified. Also,
think about the overhead built into using software to circumvent
a hardware limitation.

You will have dummy and phantom partition tables that
only the software can translate. When you want to
delete the software, you need to run the uninstall routine
(so save that Ontrack diskette) and you lose the data on the
drive (so back it up).

There's quite a few issues involved with choosing drive software.

Regards,

John Chin