IIRC 7GB, older 7+GB hard drives will have a jumper setting for limiting to this

The answer is.... it depends:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Is your controller card SCSI? If it's not SCSI, then I would just find a SCSI board. You don't have to worry too much about drive size limitations with SCSI and your system will be faster. The IDE controllers and drives from back then were awful compared to SCSI and later IDE ones.

SCSI has it's own sets of limitations, especially for the older cards.

With old systems like that, it's best to use something called dynamic drive overlay, which is designed as a TSR which chainloads the OS after loading itself and doing translation. Windows XP and newer (I do not recall if win2k pro does it) actually do something similar for themselves built in, but older OSes do not.

I found a 4.3gb Fujitsu in the loft. Its detached in the cmos setup but shows the wrong size. It doesn’t have a jumper to change its size. I also found a 13gb Maxtor with a jumper marked cap but its not detected at all by the system.

Its an IDE controller, a SCSI one would be great but in the UK they don’t come up often on ebay. Most of the old PC stuff is being sold at high prices by recycling companies. I don’t think there were as many PC users here in the UK because the Amiga was more popular system for home users.🙁

Soupdragon wrote:

I found a 4.3gb Fujitsu in the loft. Its detached in the cmos setup but shows the wrong size. It doesn’t have a jumper to change its size. ...(

Sounds like you have a BIOS with the 504mb limitation as described in my first post then. You'll need either a BIOS update, a disk controller with onboard BIOS or drive overlay software to work around it.

jaqie is on the right track IMHO. I use OnTrack Disk Manager with my IBM 386 machine and I have installed and working a 20GB HDD on it.... no need to hunt down scsi controllers and horrible old scsi drives....

Ditto that. I've just ressurrected an old IBM Thinkpad (p166mmx), it supports up to 8gb, but I didn't want to use anything so old as one of them. I installed Ontrack and a brand new 60gb drive and it works like a champ.

Thanks that software looks like it would fix it. Couple of questions anyone recommend any free-ware alternatives £40 is not cheap. Does the software take up much system memory.

a few kilobytes, and you can find it as abandonware in many places - it was given for free with hard drives for ages.

Interesting, I never thought it would consume any ram at all, from what I understood it just patched the bios to enable correct hdd support, I always thought it used the ram assigned to BIOS that is not usable at the end user ....

If you use the ontrack software it does take a few kb as shown in mem /c
Nothing you will notice though 😀

OP you can get it here http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm as Jacqie said they were free with certain hard drives.

I've found the Maxblast plus will work with other brands of drive (this installs the ontrack software).

out of curiosity I did a mem /c on my IBM machine with retail OnTrack 9.57:

I can't see it taking up any mem... same is without EMM386 btw

total memory.... 16,239,616
16MiB=16,777,216 (16*1024*1024)
640KiB=655,360

Here's mine:

You can see the ONTRACK driver taking up 6K of upper memory.

I'm using the
Quantum branded Ontrack DDO, version 9.52
Jaqie makes an interesting observation - If this is indeed a change in behaviour of the different versions of Ontrack, I'd rather use my version since it loads in upper memory, not conventional - barring some configuration option to force it into upper memory.

jaqie wrote:

total memory.... 16,239,616
16MiB=16,777,216 (16*1024*1024)
640KiB=655,360

🤣 I never looked on the 655.360 value... so it does take some mem... I always thought it updated the bios shadow area or something like that...

The 16MB value is OK though as the IBM machine allows a total of 15.872kb available to the end user. The rest are reserved from system boot. (the memory count+test is up to 15.872kb - and it happens every cold boot and you cannot bypass it and there is no way to reclaim them 😵 )

@DK: meh, I'll still gonna use 9.57 as I prefer it to allocate mem beyond the user's 640kb even if it means you get less than 640kb... that way it's more difficult for a prog to try reclaim or tamper with it since it's located outside the user area, both convecntional and HMA as it seems... also with almost 620.000 free bytes of conventional ram I don't see a reason to try and reclaim the lost mem 😊

DonutKing wrote:

OP you can get it here http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm as Jacqie said they were free with certain hard drives.

A handful of the links on that page are broken now.

I've downloaded all the working links and put them on VogonsDrivers, under Utilities.

😀

Would this software work on one of these http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/140536730187?ssPage … 984.m1438.l2649 and would one of these work in my 486. This drive would be faster, silent and require no ide cable. 😁

No reason it shouldn't, but you should only need it if the motherboard BIOS does not support LBA (504MB limit). If it doesn't work, the device does not conform to standard ATA/IDE spec and it is at fault. I myself have a couple of PATA to CF adapters that stick into the socket directly and have a 1GB CF card, I am building an x86 router out of a p3/733MHz computer.