[H-GEN] Accessing large disks using an old BIOS

[Frank Brand]

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>Greetings,
>I have a sitution where I wish to put a 2G drive into and old 486DX100

Does the BIOS support 2 Gb drives...a lot of 486 boxes will only support 512
Mb as the biggest hard drive. It may be possible to get a BIOS upgrade that
will allow it. Many 486 DX4/100's started life as DX33's for instance and
the BIOS is quite old. It may tell you you have a 30 Mb or 80 mb HDD or
maybe it will set it to 512 Mb. Also the old BIOS's are not as intelligent
as the current BIOS's and the disk parameters (C/H/S) may need to be
inserted manually if there is not auto-detect.

>box and I'm coming a little unstuck.  The BIOS is (obviously) fairly old
>and I don't seem to be able to configure it to work with the drive.  I
>can actually set the correct parameters into the BIOS, but it hangs
>during the POST if I do that.
>


The software Sandra refers to is On-Track disk manager. Each manufacturer
has its own programme which will only work with disk of its own type. I have
a Seagate On-Track disk but not the software for other disks. Therer was
another disk manager released with a name like Ez or something like that but
On-Track is the most common system. It generally sits in the boot sector
from memory, not above the BIOS as Sandra suggested.


Frank Brand


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