On 10 Oct 98 at 23:44, Kevin Nowicki wrote:

> I went back into CMOS setup and looked at the HD options.  The
> problem being that at one time it did recognize 2.1gig.  The bootup
> screen shows 2.1 gig. The CMOS options  list "normal" "LBA" and
> "large" but the cylinder counts are different.  I tried setting it
> to LBA and when I boot up it hangs.  I get the message "non system
> disk" although there is no floppy inserted.  I put in a boot disk
> (Dos 6.2) and went to the fdisk screen.  I displayed option 4
> (display partitions) and it listed just the 500mg partition and
> said that was 100% of the space available.
>
> By choosing LBA or Large  in the CMOS setup, would I then have to
> delete the existing partition and reformat?

  The short answer is:  YES.

  "LBA" and "Large" allow DOS to access drives larger than 504 MB by
playing tricks with the drive "geometry", telling DOS about fewer
cylinders and more sectors or heads.  This means there is now a
"mapping" layer, translating DOS's idea of cylinder/head/sector
locations into real physical locations.
  Unfortunately, the old locations, from when you fdisked and
formatted the drive with "Normal" selected, now match up to different
physical locations than they did.  You must re-fdisk and re-format to
correct this.  [You might want to back up anything valuable on the
"Normal" setting first....]

David G

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