On Wed, 9 Sep 1998 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?

Strange (but not unusual ;-) that you should ask us about a HD
and mobo/BIOS but not tell us what kind they are.

If you asked a car magazine if a new engine will be compatible
with your old transmission, you'd have to say more than
"it's an early 90's model" to get detailed engineering advice.

It may well work, but potential problems include:

* if it's a large HDD, the old BIOS may use a disk manager
  you should dump, or an LBA mapping incompatible with the FIC,
  and you will need to backup, reformat and restore files.

* an old HD may not be compatible with the 3.3V logic voltage
  on a modern IDE interface - no work around for this.

* if you plan to add extra drives, some older drives are choosy
  about sharing an IDE channel as Master, Slave or at all(!),
  so you may have to dedicate one channel to the drive.


Len Warner <[log in to unmask]> http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/ ICQ:10120933

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