>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?
>
>Kevin Nowicki
Yes you will have to do that. The geometry of the drive changes with the
different modes
Using a WD 31200 as an example the drive it self lists parameters as 2484
cylinders 16 heads and 63 sectors per track. LBA would be 828 cylinders 48
heads and 63 sectors per track. if you do the math it all works out the
same. The issue is getting the drive below 1024 cylinders in the cmos/bios.
What that means that any data written to the drive in the original state
will not be readable if you change the way the machine looks at the drive.
It has to do with the way the data is passed to the drive. IDE drives
actually have the drive controller on the drive its self. Altho I would
consider the fact that you could not see past 504 megs as a blessing. I
have talked to far to many folks that didn't know their drive was
configured improperly and have lost data when they past the 504 meg mark.
What happens at that point is the drive tries to write data to an area that
doesn't exist and ends up writing over the front of the drive depending on
where it was trying to write to and how much it was trying to write. its
not pretty trying to rebuild a drive when that happens. I hope this
explains this a little better.
[Brian Coe]
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