Second hard drive: Part 2

[Madison Kelly]

Owning an 80GB at the largest I don't have personal experience with
pushing beyond the BIOS' 128GB limit that Henry spoke about (though I
knew it exists) however I have in the past accessed and mounted drives
not seen by the system BIOS... I know a while back when the 8GB limit
was the issue (and later with the 32GB limit) there where custom boot
loaders (or such) included with the drives called Disk Drive Overlay
(DDO) utilities. These allowed you to surpas BIOS limits and the method
these appas used may be the same methods Linux uses (accessing the
drives around the BIOS). 

Have you checked you mainboard manufacturer's website to see if they
have an updated BIOS for your mainboard? If so, read the updates and I
am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that a patch to allow drives
larger than originally planned is available. 

Madison

BTW - By specifying UDMA/133 (ATA133) I am assuming that you are looking
at a Maxtor/Western Digital. If I may, -please- avoid those like the
plague! I am sure others here may disagree with me but I have worked on
-many- systems and I have seen too many of those die. In fact I was
helping a person with a dead 200GB Maxtor this morning. Seagate 7200.7
drives are fantastic and I have never regretted using them (or their
predecessors).

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 14:52, Phillip Mills wrote:
> I'm still trying to get enough information to feel comfortable about 
> sticking a second hard drive in my PC with some hope of it working.
> 
> The machine is a Dell XPS B733: Pentium 3, about 3 or 4 years old.  I 
> went shopping yesterday and the first person I talked to who sounded 
> knowledgeable said that a current 40GB drive would *probably* work, but 
> larger ones might not be recognized by the IDE controller.  My user 
> manual says the Dell uses ATA-33 (which I assume matches the 33Mhz PCI 
> bus speed), while current drives all refer to ATA-133.  The 
> salesperson's not-very-reassuring comment was that the 133 drives 
> should be backward compatible to 100...and then I started wondering 
> whether he was talking about RAM speeds instead.
> 
> So, as usual, the more I think about PC hardware, the more confused I 
> become.  I used to run Linux on one of my Macs and I'm having trouble 
> remembering why I switched.  Oh, ya...someone gave me a free Intel box! 
>   :-)
> 
> Anyone willing to share some relevant facts?
> 
> ........................
> Phillip Mills
> Multi-platform software development
> (416) 224-0714
> 
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-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Madison Kelly
416-208-0146
mkelly_At_alteeve_Dot_com

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