There are at least two ways to do it.

- If you are happy with only an 8GB (or less) HDD, you can use a utility like Seagate Seatools to adjust it as a "fake 8GB (or less) drive" (i.e. limit its capacity to 8GB or less), so there will be no BIOS issues.

- If you want the whole capacity, you need to be using an overlay sofware like Ontrack (or any other brand specific versions of it) to install it and you will have all 40GB available (though a small program will be loaded from your HDD's MBR to take over the handling).

By the way, I wouldn't suggest using MS-DOS (or w9x) Fdisk. You can go to:

http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.php

and download bugfixed/better versions of Fdisk (Search for FDSKFRMT.EXE or BHDD 3.1). You can laso use any of the much better 3rd party partitioning utilities. My personal favorite is "efdisk" from masterbooter package (comes free with its shareware version).

P.S. Do not forget that a proper boot parition should be created as a "primary partition" and must be "active".

Thanks a bunch for the quick reply!

tayyare wrote:

There are at least two ways to do it.

- If you are happy with only an 8GB (or less) HDD, you can use a utility like Seagate Seatools to adjust it as a "fake 8GB (or less) drive" (i.e. limit its capacity to 8GB or less), so there will be no BIOS issues.

I see, so is that an entirely different process than just making a 8 GB primary active partition with something like Partition Wizard or Diskpart?

tayyare wrote:

- If you want the whole capacity, you need to be using an overlay sofware like Ontrack (or any other brand specific versions of it) to install it and you will have all 40GB available (though a small program will be loaded from your HDD's MBR to take over the handling).

Very cool!
I would be happy with just 8 GB since it's a 50 Mhz 486 and I mostly want the new HDD for reduced noise, increased access and to store the odd CD-image, but I might try it just for kicks. The other thing is, that neither my Windows 7 nor XP machines can see the old 800 Mb HDD via a USB-IDE interface, even though they can see other FAT16 HDDs just fine...

tayyare wrote:

By the way, I wouldn't suggest using MS-DOS (or w9x) Fdisk. You can go to:

http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.php

and download bugfixed/better versions of Fdisk (Search for FDSKFRMT.EXE or BHDD 3.1). You can laso use any of the much better 3rd party partitioning utilities. My personal favorite is "efdisk" from masterbooter package (comes free with its shareware version).

Yeah, I had already noticed that DOS 6.22's FDisk and the one that comes on a Windows 95 bootdisk behave very differently. As I mentioned, I was using Diskpart and Partition Wizard unsuccesfully.

henryVK wrote:

Thanks a bunch for the quick reply!

No problems at all! 🤣

henryVK wrote:

I see, so is that an entirely different process than just making a 8 GB primary active partition with something like Partition Wizard or Diskpart?

Yeah, somehow it is. It will limit the size of your disk to something smaller, so your BIOS will see it as it was a smaller capacity HDD.

henryVK wrote:

Very cool!
I would be happy with just 8 GB since it's a 50 Mhz 486 and I mostly want the new HDD for reduced noise, increased access and to store the odd CD-image, but I might try it just for kicks. The other thing is, that neither my Windows 7 nor XP machines can see the old 800 Mb HDD via a USB-IDE interface, even though they can see other FAT16 HDDs just fine...

I have not much idea why this happens, but it happens. My Windows 7 PC wants me to reformat an old WD mybook 500GB HDD as soon as I plugged it, whereas daughter's Windows 10 PC just sees it without any fuss.

henryVK wrote:

Yeah, I had already noticed that DOS 6.22's FDisk and the one that comes on a Windows 95 bootdisk behave very differently. As I mentioned, I was using Diskpart and Partition Wizard unsuccesfully.

In anyways, I still suggest to use a bug fixed fdisk or some other simple and straight forward dos based partitioning utility. I suggest you to use seatools to limit its capacity to 8GB or less, create a primary active parttion, use W98 startup floppy or similar to format it like FORMAT C: /S to make it DOS bootable and see if it boots. If it works, you can continue to do whatever you want from there. If it does not, then maybe there is some other problem, probably hardware related.

For some reason Seatools does not see the HDD in question via the USB/IDE adapter. I've tried the DOS version on my laptop, but so far it crashes midway through loading..

I tried looking for an alternative to Seatools as far as setting HDD capacity, but no dice so far. If anyone knows of a different solution, preferably via my windows 7 machine, that would be awesome!

Swapping files to my other laptop and then using the com-cable to move them to my 486 is quite the ordeal ^^

There's a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter somewhere over the rainbow. Check eBay (there's usually some on there, but I digress) or your local computer store.

henryVK wrote:

For some reason Seatools does not see the HDD in question via the USB/IDE adapter. I've tried the DOS version on my laptop, but so far it crashes midway through loading..

I tried looking for an alternative to Seatools as far as setting HDD capacity, but no dice so far. If anyone knows of a different solution, preferably via my windows 7 machine, that would be awesome!

Swapping files to my other laptop and then using the com-cable to move them to my 486 is quite the ordeal ^^

doing low level IDE operations like that does not reliably work over USB adapters. You might have to do it on a native IDE port.

Koltoroc wrote:

doing low level IDE operations like that does not reliably work over USB adapters. You might have to do it on a native IDE port.

Cheers, people. That's what I figured in the end!

Apparently I'm destined to stock up on adapters and usb dongles. Already ordered a (name brand) usb floppy drive as well.

Okay, thanks everyone! The key info on this was to just use the proper version of FDISK, being the one that comes i.e. on a Win98 bootdisk. After making a primary partition with maximum capacity and formatting the drive everything worked like a charm. Even my Win 7 desktop pc can see the HDD via IDE/USB interface again...

Noise is down to a whisper, performance is noticably better; should measure framerate in Doom II some time, to see what that amounts to in FPS.