>Hello, > >Although the situation described here occurred with a Pentium system, I >believe it to be relevant: > >I have found, with systems as new as Packard Bell P100, that having the >LBA mode enabled can actually cause problems with a hard drive. > >My experience is as follows: > >When I attempted to install the 4 gig drive, the system (PB Pentium 100, >16MB RAM, 8/95 Bios, Original HDD 1.2 Gig) would not see it. No matter >how many times I attempted to install it with LBA, it would not work. I >gave up for a while. > >When I finally had time to fiddle, I put the drive in and set the BIOS >Drive settings for "User Defined", and fiddled with the settings, but >using the correct # of heads, until I got the closest drive capacity to >what was on the drive label. > >The system recogized the drive, I formatted and FDISK'd and it worked >fine for 2 months, when I moved the drive back to my main system. > >***The bad news: When I migrated the drive back to my main system, the >format was unreadable. I had to reformat. So if you plan to move it >from system to system, this method may not suit you. > >Kim Hillyer This sounds like a BIOS problem. Some of the earlier LBA's would only read up to 2.1 gigs. Probably, when you put in the User Defined data, it forced the computer to write in a different set of sectors, then when you put it in the other machine, the new machine looked for the correct sector sections and couldn't read the info. Donald Gaither ----- **Need help with PCBUILD mailing list? Send an Email to:** Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> or Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>