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Putting a modern hard drive in an old Aptiva

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First post, by Subjunctive

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My P-133 Aptiva came with a 1.5 GB drive. It's more than enough to hold everything I need, but it sounds like a swarm of bees - a bad bearing, I guess. What I'd like to do is replace it with a newer, quieter drive, which would make the excess space even more obscene. I know that motherboards of the time (this machine is from '96) had pretty strict limits on drive sizes that they would recognize, but I seem to recall there being ways around this such as a software-based BIOS. Can anyone offer any suggestions in this regard?

P.S. Thanks again for the help with DOS networking. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any drivers for my NIC; I ended up just RAR-ing stuff over multiple floppies (good compression, that RAR!).

Reply 3 of 11, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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gulikoza wrote:

You can always clip the drive to 2 or 8GB (some drives that don't have a jumper can be software clipped)

Wait, that's interesting; so we don't have actually hunt for old, low-capacity hard drives on ebay to fit the retro mobo? (like 440BX, for instance). How do you do that, exactly? I mean, clip the drive?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 4 of 11, by swaaye

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Look up the jumper settings. I've never personally messed with limiting a drive like that though. If there aren't any jumpers to do it and the system won't finish POSTing with it in, you will just need a controller card. You should get a controller anyway because 1) they are cheap 2) they are fast 3) full drive size available. It's neat to have a ATA133 or SATA controller on a 486 PCI mobo. 😀

Reply 5 of 11, by gulikoza

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I used to run a 80GB maxtor drive on p150. BIOS did not POST with full drive capacity so I software clipped it to 8GB on my main machine. Linux also has a special kernel option that queries the drive directly for the capacity, so I got full 80GB in linux even when bios reported only 8GB 🤣

http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza

Reply 6 of 11, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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gulikoza wrote:

so I software clipped it to 8GB

Okay, how do we software clip hard drives? And does it also work with modern hard drives without jumpers?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 8 of 11, by swaaye

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gulikoza wrote:

Linux also has a special kernel option that queries the drive directly for the capacity, so I got full 80GB in linux even when bios reported only 8GB 🤣

I think XP will do this too, actually. I seem to remember seeing this happen once.

Reply 9 of 11, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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gulikoza wrote:

There's some info here. I used the setmax utility on my Maxtor...

Wait, setmax is a linux utils, but it modifies the hard drive permanently, isn't it? (at least until you "unclip" the hard drive by running setmax again). So it is possible to do the following steps, isn't it?
(1) plug the hard drive on a linux system.
(2) clip it with setmax.
(3) unplug the hard drive and plug it to the legacy system (Win 98 and DOS) where it will be used.

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 11 of 11, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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gulikoza wrote:

yes, exactly like that 😀

Thanks! No need to hunt old hard drives to be put on legacy system, then. 😀

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

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