About a large hard drive
>> Hello. I am about to purchase a 10gig WD HD.
for William Patton's
>> have an Asus m/b with HX chipset, bios5/97,
>> 200MMX, win98SE.
>> I am wondering about what
>> limitations to be aware of.
>> Someone said there may be a 8gig limit of some sort.
Jun Qian wrote:
>Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 22:51:16 +1100
>From: Ultra <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: New HD installation
>
>This question has been asked before, the answer is sadly "No", if your mobo
>won't support large HDD (in your case, it doesn't),
And here the usually correct Jun Quin is *wrong8 about most Asus t2p4
series mainboards at least!
It supports
supports AT LEAST 8GB
BIOS 2.07 from late 1998 supports up to 32GB meaning it has full INT13
extensions
I think 32GB is the limit of the int13 extensions of BIOS and greater
than 32GB needs BIOS extensions to the int13 extensions.
However if you have the board I think Asus P/I-P55T2P4 by all means
get the 207-2 Beta BIOS. That one is very stable and supports the AMD
K6-2 and K6-3 with CTX core so you can get the 6x multiplier by
setting the 2x clock jumpers for when you put in an inexpensive fast
AMD 350 400 and 450 MHz CPU.
Its usually easiest to find this "beta" BIOS somewhere on one of Asus
German ftp sites. Your web surfing / web searching skills might be
tested and tried to find it though.
(But if you have a server using the uncommon Asus P/I-P55T2P4S the
one with onboard SCSI I don't know for sure just what the latest BIOS
will do. Same for the ATX version of the board. Also uncommon)
>Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 08:40:02 -0600
>From: Gene Bounds <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: New HD installation
>
>you have to format your drive with the ver. of win that supports large
>drives and select the 32mb size not the 16mb size as the 16mb size will only
>support up to 2gb, I think.I had to do an old dell this way
And Gene here means you need a verion of Windows that supports the
FAT32 file system. Win98 SE, Win98, Win 95OSR2 support this option.
The 2gb limit is on the partition size under FAT16. Meaning if using
FAT16 a large hard drive would need to have several partitions
because FAT16 partitions can be no that lager than 2GB. This limit
depends only on OS version. Yes you likely want to use the normal
FAT32 option.
File system, partition and file size limits is a question of support
by the OS.
But hard drive size limit is a question of wha BIOS and if it
supports User Type, Large Block Addressing (LBA), INT13 extensions and
for over 32GB extensions to those extensions.
Jun Qian further wrote:
>you can only use upto
>whatever the mobo sees how big is the HDD (unless you use "special program
>come with them", which I won't use for myself no matter how/when - unless
>someone point a gun to my head ...). Even you changed a new mobo later, the
>size won't change automatically unless you erase the HDD and start over
>again (sometime Fdisk won't fix the mis-size problem, you will have to
>"zero" fill the HDD - use a special program to write "Zero" from first
>track, first sector on the harddisk, so that no info would left).
>Use a
>large HDD as a "smaller" mis-sized HDD may not only create problem for later
>change, it also can damage the HDD physically (I've seen it!).
I'm a bit uncertain about this last point but I have seen quite a few
10GBs installed clipped for an 8GB limit and a 35GB or 40GB installed
"clipped" to 32GB. On reuse to full capacity in another computer no
ill affects but usually had to use a utility to write zeros to much of
the drive. Also the drive mfgrs website might reveal special jumpering
for limiting drive size to less than full capacity. I think most hard
drives over 8Gb probably take care of their landing zone by onboard
firmware.
I bet the "physical damage" JQ he has seen were with HDs forced to
the old BIOS limits of 2 and 4GB limits or maybe even the old 512MB
limit. Some drives of that era COULD be damaged that way but drive
manufacturers have probably wised up and now design to avoid physical
damage.
As for the evils of disk overlay software that comes with the drive or
is licenced (and often renamed!) by the HD mfgr like EZBIOS, Ontrack
Data Manager etc. ..
This does actually work well to allow hard drives over BIOS limits and
pretty good reliably too but it IS a royal pain to remove to put the
drive in another system especially if you want to transfer your data
off first.
So if you possibly can do avoid it as Jun Quin suggests.
>(unless you use "special program
>>come with them", which I won't use for myself no matter how/when - unless
>>someone point a gun to my head ...)
Its not as evil as all that though if you are starving for space! It
does add a layer of confusion if booting from floppy.
The utilities that write zeros to hard drives Jun Qian speaks of are
actually quite handy when dealing with the results of all the screwy
versions of FDISK. Sometimes one might think a pull-out drive you want
to put in another system is bad but it just needs zeros written over
the results of some strange FDISK version under an odd geometry.
Microsoft Fdisk just isn't as near clever or as rigorous as Partition
Magic (excellent and easy) or Ranish Partition Manager (free and
detailed).
Mark Paulson
- Silicon Valley, California
Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org
|
