[H-GEN] Wanted to buy

[Frank Brand]

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>The disk is an old 2gig drive i scavenged from a second hand box and was
>wondering if anyone had a spare disk smaller than 8gig, which I expect is
>the limit of the100Mhz pentium motherboard. I can't find anyone that sells
>a new drive smaller than 10gig and as this is only a machine I am using to
>experiment with I'm not inclined to spend much on it.


It is nearly impossible to find new Hard drives under 10 Gb and even 10's
are harder to find - reason 10 Gb are about $150-$160 and 20 Gb are only
about $160-$175 so it is worth the extra $15 for another 10 Gb, especially
if you are dual booting.

A second hand 2 Gb would be around the $70-$80, 3Gb to 4GB around $80 to
$100, 6 to 8 Gb might be $100 to $120. I got a guy a nice 6 Gb Quantum for
$110 recently. Really I think a new 20 Gb is much better value...with a two
or three year warranty.

However, it is usually possible to upgrade the BIOS on motherboards to read
drives over 8 Gb if the board is well supported and you know what the board
is (this can be determined from the serial number that comes up at the lower
left hand corner on boo-up). Also, as long as the drive can be seen in the
BIOS (even if it is the wrong size) Linux (and usually Windows for that
matter) will pick up the right size...Linux especially because as long as it
knows that there is a disk there it will read the disk parameters from the
disk itself and not take the information from the BIOS...on some occassions
with some motherboards Windows will do the same.

>Also I have a young school aged friend converting from Macintosh to Linux
>and he has managed to collect most of the bits he needs for a gaming system
>he wants to impress his Windoze mates with (based on an old 200mhz
>motherboard his uncle passed onto him.  He has his heart set on a voodoo 3
>card with 16mb. Being a Macophile myself and only having used basic S3
>compatible video cards in the two boxes I've been experimenting on I don't
>know if a spare one of those I have will suit his needs. Again anyone have
>such a spare card lying around?



Why not run Linux on his Mac?



Frank Brand


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