I have a seagate hard drive that is 545Mb. I was wondering if there would be any chance to use it in a system that has the 528Mb size limit. Like would it work if you set it in bios to have 1024 cylinders instead of the actual 1057 cylinders that the hard drive has or would that cause problems?
I did something similar for a 512mb CF card in a system that only supports fixed disk types, I set it to the closest size (504mb) and haven’t had any issues. I think I do remember seeing some errors during the formatting but no real issues yet. That said I haven’t filled the drive to near capacity yet either.
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It works as long as none of the CHS values are set higher than what the drive reports. So you can use 1024 cylinders instead of 1057, but you can't set e.g. 3 heads to compensate less cylinders (or sectors) if the hard drive reports only 2 heads. This is important because the max. drive size of 528 MB translates to CHS 1024/16/63, which may use higher values than your 545 MB drive for heads and/or sectors.
Well, the limit in bios is 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors when the hard drive actually has 1057 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, so the cylinder value is the only one I would need to change.
Would anyone happen to know what year this hard drive is from?
Large or big mode gets you up to 1gb on many older machines.
Oddly 540mb hard drives were very common, much more common than anything 500-528mb, one would hope A machine made post 1990 could use one
Baoran wrote on 2020-02-16, 18:52:Well, the limit in bios is 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors when the hard drive actually has 1057 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, so the cylinder value is the only one I would need to change.
No issues to expect then.
Baoran wrote on 2020-02-16, 18:52:Would anyone happen to know what year this hard drive is from?
1995.
rmay635703 wrote on 2020-02-16, 19:07:Large or big mode gets you up to 1gb on many older machines.
Oddly 540mb hard drives were very common, much more common than anything 500-528mb, one would hope A machine made post 1990 could use one
Most hard drives were sold under decimal MB at the time, since the number was larger.
540 Decimal MB = 540,016,640 Bytes = 515 Binary MB
So depending how you count, the 540 MB drives were smack dab in the 500-528MB range.
Using 1024 is not recommended due to bugs in MSDOS, use 1023 instead.
douglar wrote on 2020-02-16, 21:28:Most hard drives were sold under decimal MB at the time, since the number was larger. […]
rmay635703 wrote on 2020-02-16, 19:07:Large or big mode gets you up to 1gb on many older machines.
Oddly 540mb hard drives were very common, much more common than anything 500-528mb, one would hope A machine made post 1990 could use one
Most hard drives were sold under decimal MB at the time, since the number was larger.
540 Decimal MB = 540,016,640 Bytes = 515 Binary MB
So depending how you count, the 540 MB drives were smack dab in the 500-528MB range.
derSammler wrote on 2020-02-16, 19:14:No issues to expect then. […]
Baoran wrote on 2020-02-16, 18:52:Well, the limit in bios is 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors when the hard drive actually has 1057 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, so the cylinder value is the only one I would need to change.
No issues to expect then.
Baoran wrote on 2020-02-16, 18:52:Would anyone happen to know what year this hard drive is from?
1995.
jmarsh wrote on 2020-02-16, 21:43:Using 1024 is not recommended due to bugs in MSDOS, use 1023 instead.
Thank you all for your help. I was thinking of getting a pc that is confirmed that it doesn't accept larger values than 1024 cylinders in bios, but hard drive has been removed from it and this is the smallest hard drive I have currently that is not in use, so the main thing was that I was worried about was that if the disk geometry is wrong in the bios it would mess up the hard drive in some way when trying to format and use it.
For the most part, no. You only run into trouble with that when, like others have said, you change the heads and sectors parameters, OR if some driver has direct access to the controller and can query the hard drive directly. It may find that the values reported by the drive are different from those reported by the BIOS and refuse to try accessing the disk with "different" parameters. This is a corner case though, and with DOS, is unlikely to ever be an issue.
