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First post, by GabrielKnight123

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I have a 386 PC im building and in the bios are the settings for the hard drive ie: Cylinders, Heads and Sectors I have put in what is on the hard drive C\H\S 6256 - 16 - 63 and it shows up as 3079MB it should be 3.2GB. Two settings I have no idea about are "WPcom" and "LZone" they are set to zero, am I right that these need to be set to get 3.2GB?

Reply 1 of 4, by bjwil1991

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The Lzone is the last Cylinder (6256), and WPCom should be set to either 0 or 65535/equivalent. Also, the BIOS might have a limitation for the HDD capacity.

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Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

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bjwil1991 explained it very well.

386 PCs were common when home users had IDE drives with capacities of roughlly 40MB to 240MB.
Larger ones existed, sure, but where usually SCSI based or had their own controllers.

If you're going to use that 3GB drive, make sure you stay within the limits of CHS.

Most BIOSes will accept 1023 Cylinders, 15 Heads and 63 Sectors/Track,
even though you can perhaps enter higher values in CMOS Setup..

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Reply 3 of 4, by bjwil1991

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Another thing to add is: purchase an XTIDE ISA controller card for higher storage capacity, or make an EEPROM with the XTIDE Universal BIOS and place the EEPROM on a network card.

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Reply 4 of 4, by K1n9_Duk3

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GabrielKnight123 wrote:

I have put in what is on the hard drive C\H\S 6256 - 16 - 63 and it shows up as 3079MB it should be 3.2GB.

6256 cylinders * 16 heads * 63 sectors * 512 bytes per sector = 3,228,696,576 bytes. The BIOS uses the factor 1024 to calculate the MB value (3,228,696,576 bytes = 3,079.125 MB). Most HDD manufacturers use the scientific factor 1000 to make it appear as if the capacity was higher.

So both values are correct and you don't need to worry about it.