safe to use a hard drive that isn't recognised fully in the bios?

tman · 21-04-2004 02:59PM #1

i had to format and install windows '98 on a friends, brother's pc last night. P166mmx with a whopping 2gb hard drive...

i felt sorry for him and decided to replace the hard drive with my spare 10gb one.
with the jumpers in the master position, it shows up as 8gb. with the jumpers in a position that made the drive show up as full size in my old pc, it shows up as 7.5gb:dunno:

i couldn't be arsed spending any time trying to get it working, so i just made a new partition using all the available space & installed windows '98.

will there be any ill effects from it being used in this way (i seem to remember hearing that it was unsafe to use 137gb+ hard drives on pre 48bit lba mainboards... which is prolly bs. but i wouldn't want to risk losing someone elses data through my half assed job)

ChipZilla · 21-04-2004 03:37PM

The BIOS can only address 8Gb. The PC will run fine seeing just 8Gb. If you want to get the full 10Gb, flashing the BIOS probably won't do anything for you, but could be worth a try. You could shell out for a PCI IDE card if you wanted to go mad..

tman · 21-04-2004 03:40PM

not really worth shelling out anything on the pc just to get an extra couple of gigs tbh.
just as long as it works and his data is secure enough...

Gerry · 21-04-2004 07:22PM

If it was running windows 2k/xp or linux, you'd see the full 10 gigs, as they use direct disc access. But you will be grand with 8 gigs.

safe to use a hard drive that isn't recognised fully in the bios?

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