I have a PC 350 (P166) as well and have been playing around with hard drives (actually compact flash drives via IDE adapter) lately. All good with 4GB but when I put a 16GB in there the BIOS spazzed out and threw setup errors at startup.

The strange part about it is that the BIOS did see the drive and its correct capacity, but no matter what I did it wouldn't save the settings, so at every reset it would throw the same error. Further, when the 16GB drive was connected the BIOS refused to see my CD-ROM at all even though I know it works and I can use it just fine with the 4GB drive.

So it is possible to boot anyway without saving the settings after any of the above hardware change errors, so I did that to a WIN98 bootdisk to try some fdisk and format. Both of those only detected the first 8GB of the drive, leading me to think that maybe the PC350 BIOS only likes drives up to 8GB. I would be really interested to see if you were able to add and use that entire 10GB drive. You should be able to add it as a slave to the original master.

Regardless, I am going to pick up an 8GB compact flash disk soon and try that out (another possibility is that this particular CF disk is maybe too fast, so I might try something under 100X at 16 or 32GB too someday).

Yeah I was able to as a second drive because I still have the original and it would recognize the full 10GB in bIos but I had to fdisk it to a 2GB partition for windows or dos to see it and then would say there is no drive when I selected the drive in windows 3.1 or dos then I had to use the format command to format the 2GB partition for windows to access it and it allowed me to use it after that but I would be able to use it as main drive but will have to partition it to 2Gb partition and fdisk the original drives partition to remove the primary dos partition to make the 10GB drives partition the C: drive.

Ah, so it does work--nice! I'm on Win95 OSR2 so I can go over 8GB, but with dos 6.22 and win 3.1 I think you'll have to keep it partitioned in some fashion.

Gotta love the PC350...great looking old box.

DOS 6.22 has a 2GB partition limit AFAIK.

guyjin37 wrote on 2021-04-12, 13:47:

Ah, so it does work--nice! I'm on Win95 OSR2 so I can go over 8GB, but with dos 6.22 and win 3.1 I think you'll have to keep it partitioned in some fashion.

Gotta love the PC350...great looking old box.

Yeah I love my IBM PC Series 350-P75 as well wish the shipper had packaged it better cause when I got it through usps it was suppose to come with a monitor and it was smashed and the case for the computer was ajar but I was able to fix that and it works good but the monitor was un salvageable which made me not very happy. I also have an IBM 300PL 6862-S3U PIII 550Mhz with 640MB Ram Windows 98SE/ME and an IBM NetVista 8303-NUE P4 2GB Ram and Geforce 6200 Jaton GPU with XP Professional for my Vintage PC Rigs and a Mac Classic I 4MB RAM and II 10MB RAM fully loaded as well, both recapped Logic boards with Tantalum Caps.

evasive wrote on 2021-04-12, 14:26:

DOS 6.22 has a 2GB partition limit AFAIK.

Yeah and forgot to mention this one came with original restore disk and cd rom! It has PC-DOS 6.33 with OS/2 Warp and Windows 3.11!

I have not been able to get the original IBM Select a System Installation/Recovery floppy and CD to use the bigger HDD as main drive because it is to big and also because it seems to remove the partitions that I do and try and reformat and partition the whole drive itself and I think it is confused by the size of the drive and doesn't know what to do, Does anyone else have any ideas?

Ouch, that shipping situation sounds rough...sorry to hear about the monitor. Lucky that the PC itself survived. Well, as if anything short of a nuclear explosion could harm anything inside that massive case.

Hm, if it's the original IBS recovery software, it was probably made in 1995-96 or earlier, since the PC350 came out around that time. Could be that it just doesn't work well with larger HDDs, whereas there were BIOS updates up until like 1999, which would explain why the computer itself is OK with the drive size.

Using fdisk, did you try to configure the drive into 5 separate 2GB partitions? And they keep getting removed by the recovery utility? If so, maybe do the recovery first using the cd with the big hdd unplugged, then plug it back in after? Of course, doing that you'd have to use it as a secondary drive. Then again, you'll be splitting your drives up into 2GB chunks anyway, so maybe it doesn't make much of a difference.

I am kind of jealous you have the original software...hope you can get it all to work.

guyjin37 wrote on 2021-04-14, 08:50:

Ouch, that shipping situation sounds rough...sorry to hear about the monitor. Lucky that the PC itself survived. Well, as if anything short of a nuclear explosion could harm anything inside that massive case.

Hm, if it's the original IBS recovery software, it was probably made in 1995-96 or earlier, since the PC350 came out around that time. Could be that it just doesn't work well with larger HDDs, whereas there were BIOS updates up until like 1999, which would explain why the computer itself is OK with the drive size.

Yeah me too

guyjin37 wrote on 2021-04-14, 08:50:

Using fdisk, did you try to configure the drive into 5 separate 2GB partitions? And they keep getting removed by the recovery utility? If so, maybe do the recovery first using the cd with the big hdd unplugged, then plug it back in after? Of course, doing that you'd have to use it as a secondary drive. Then again, you'll be splitting your drives up into 2GB chunks anyway, so maybe it doesn't make much of a difference.

I am kind of jealous you have the original software...hope you can get it all to work.

No I didn't only one 2GB Partiton so maybe that is the issue, also I can use it as secondary drive and figure that out already but you have to format it with fdisk after partitioning it or else it'll show up in windows and OS/2 but either one will not let you use it. But I did read the few page booklet that came with the disks and it does say it'll erase the partitions and create one partition.

You have those steps right: 1. fdisk then 2. format each partition. Modern Windows can handle that space for you but older Windows and I guess OS/2 need you to do it yourself from command line.

Yeah it could be that the rest of the space is just sitting there free and the utility wants to do something with it. But (as the booklet says) it could also be that shipping out the pc from the factory with partitioned drives wasn't an option and it wants to get rid of any user-made partitions that might be causing trouble.

Yeah I am going try and fill it up with the 2GB partitions today and see what happens!

Just tried and didn't work but I do get this error after format and it tries to start installing/unpacking files it says Invalid device parameters from device driver and I know it's got something to do with the HDD Like the specific driver or has to be a specific size or something written into one of the files on the floppy disk?

Would you be able to upload the recovery disks? I'd like to try them out, I think my PC 330 P100 may be able to use the same disks.

synchrite wrote on 2021-04-23, 22:58:

Would you be able to upload the recovery disks? I'd like to try them out, I think my PC 330 P100 may be able to use the same disks.

Yeah sure I'll try and will upload them as soon as I can

Could it be an issue with large HDD's with the ide controller within the motherboard chipset? Check the date of the bios and update it to the latest if you can, and maybe try out a bootable pci ide card? I used a Promise 133 card with 2 7200rpm 80gb Maxtor drives in Radio 0 on a TX chipset 233mhz P1 setup to get past a 20 or 40gb limit.

Of my three 330s, one still has the original hdd but it has been formatted and mangled. Maybe a dynamic overlay is required? I believe my oem was about ten.. the drive kicked it though.

does diskette factory work?

ODwilly wrote on 2021-04-24, 03:56:

Could it be an issue with large HDD's with the ide controller within the motherboard chipset? Check the date of the bios and update it to the latest if you can, and maybe try out a bootable pci ide card? I used a Promise 133 card with 2 7200rpm 80gb Maxtor drives in Radio 0 on a TX chipset 233mhz P1 setup to get past a 20 or 40gb limit.

I know I did update the bios but not sure if it was newest or not but it was one I could find I'll have to look again, I'll have to find one of those and try the pci ide card.

synchrite wrote on 2021-04-24, 04:25:

Of my three 330s, one still has the original hdd but it has been formatted and mangled. Maybe a dynamic overlay is required? I believe my oem was about ten.. the drive kicked it though.

does diskette factory work?

What do you mean Dynamic overlay? I have not tried the diskette factory yet need to order a bunch of floppies cause I've already used the ones I have.

It will wipe out your recovery partition so make sure you've got a backup image..

Phil has a great video about it here https://youtu.be/8LzCB6kDVC8 . It basically it's a piece of software that translates larger hdd capacities for a bios that isn't made to accept so high.. careful though, it will wipe your entire disk.

Can you tell me how diskette factory works, is it running from a folder somewhere I might be able to restore somehow? I've got tons of floppies but can't find much info on whether it lives in a recovery partition (that i don't have) or what.

It may be related to your bios not saving? mine will detect changes to the hdd, whether it's cdrom drive or an sd adapter or actual hdd. Maybe it's just a battery issue? the bios save is a bit unlike others in used to, save is separate from save and quit... but it should be evident it's saving between boots.