On  4 May 98 at 16:10, Patrick Black wrote:

> I was wondering how to setup a HD using fdisk, and xcopy.  I might
> be buying a much larger HD in the coming months, and was wondering
> how I could set one up.

  This is a very good idea.

> And another question or 2, If I copy from a compressed drive to an
> uncompressed drive with the compressed drive having Win95, will window's
> show an error of some sort?and/or  should I move everything execpt Win95
> to the uncompressed drive, decompress the compressed, then copy Win95?

  What I prefer to do is use Partition Magic to:

1.  Copy the host drive/partition (includes the compressed volume
file which contains the compressed "drive") to the new hard drive.

2.  Increase the size of the partition on the new drive.

3.  Go into Win95 and decompress the volume.

  I'm gathering, from what you are saying, that you have your boot
drive compressed.  Since the BIOS knows nothing about compression,
there has to be boot code on the host drive to install the
compression drivers and pass control to boot code on the compressed
drive.  I'm uncertain as to whether this compressed boot code will
work as "raw" boot code, or is specific to the compressed drive case.
  Rather than experiment, I prefer to let the "uncompress" deal with
this issue.

> Last question, Is it true that the Larger Hard Drives(1 Gig or
> better) will get bad clusters if run on a i486 (mine is a
> i486DX2-50Mhz--Overdrive)?

  Possibly, but it's more likely that only some of the space on the
drive will be accessible to BIOS and FDISK.  There are two common
scenarios:

1.  A BIOS limit is often hit at just over 500MB (variously reported
as 504MB (M = 2^20) or 528MB (M = 10^6).  The preferred correction
for this is a BIOS feature called LBA, which some older 486 BIOSes
may not offer.  [This, and various workarounds, has been discussed
before....]

2.  Another limit may show up at about 2.1GB; on some machines, only
2.1GB of a larger drive may be seen, on others, only the remainder
(i.e., a 2.5GB drive may appear as 400MB).  I believe the only fix in
this case is a new BIOS.

David G