>Hello,
>
>Although the situation described here occurred with a Pentium
system, I
>believe it to be relevant:
>
>I have found, with systems as new as Packard Bell P100, that
having the
>LBA mode enabled can actually cause problems with a hard
drive.
>
>My experience is as follows:
>
>When I attempted to install the 4 gig drive, the system (PB
Pentium 100,
>16MB RAM, 8/95 Bios, Original HDD 1.2 Gig) would not see it.
No matter
>how many times I attempted to install it with LBA, it would not
work.  I
>gave up for a while.
>
>When I finally had time to fiddle, I put the drive in and set
the BIOS
>Drive settings for "User Defined", and fiddled with the
settings, but
>using the correct # of heads, until I got the closest drive
capacity to
>what was on the drive label.
>
>The system recogized the drive, I formatted and FDISK'd and it
worked
>fine for 2 months, when I moved the drive back to my main
system.
>
>***The bad news: When I migrated the drive back to my main
system, the
>format was unreadable. I had to reformat.  So if you plan to
move it
>from system to system, this method may not suit you.
>
>Kim Hillyer


This sounds like a BIOS problem.  Some of the earlier LBA's
would only read up to 2.1 gigs.  Probably, when you put in the
User Defined data, it forced the computer to write in a
different set of sectors, then when you put it in the other
machine, the new machine looked for the correct sector sections
and couldn't read the info.

Donald Gaither

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