VOGONS


First post, by Vresiberba

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Thought I'd be smart and install DOS 7.1 to get support for larger partitions, alas, I soon discovered that my Intel socket 7, MMX 200, LT430TX board doesn't support drives over 8GB. So what's the best workaround for this:

  • Look for a BIOS hack
  • Get a PCI IDE card and use SD to IDE
  • Get a PCI SATA card and use a SSD
  • Run two 8GB SD cards with 7.1 and give up large support
  • Be a heathen and keep running 6.22 and grieve I can't install every PC game there is

The board supports PCI 2.1, so I guess the controller can't be above that. The solution also doesn't need the ability to boot as I'll use an SD/CF solution for a boot drive and the larger for games only, but I'd want at least 64GB for my D: drive.

Reply 1 of 3, by zapbuzz

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You could use a dynamic drive overlay with the built in IDE at the price of small amount of memory.
Due to bandwidth of the FSB I couldn't recommend SATA.
An addon IDE card would only be good with its own bios disk detection (usually RAID marketed)or system will still detect your capacity issues.
Here is where old bios get patched for larger hard disks and theres a forum to ask for them https://www.wimsbios.com

Reply 2 of 3, by Vresiberba

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Thanks, zapbuzz, I will look into that.

I decided to test and brute-install DOS 7.1 on this board using an 80GB Seagate hard drive, and I got some surprising results. When looking in the BIOS, I can indeed see that the limit is 8GB, or slightly over with the latest P10 BIOS but when I installed DOS 7.1, it reported that the disk size was 10,78.4MB! That's... obviously not correct, even though it took a good 10-15 minutes to format.

Yet, lo and behold, the system installs on the disk correctly, works flawlessly, reports some 80GB of total size in DOS and after filling it with some 20GB of data, it still reads and writes as it should. Can anyone share some light on this? Is the disk safe to use? I mean, it's only for games, but still, I don't want is to crash. And, would it be safe to assume that using a 64GB SD to IDE would also work?

Also, please, is there a better tool to see hard drive data such as used space and such. chkdsk is incredibly slow and I don't trust it.

Reply 3 of 3, by Sphere478

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Re: Gateway 2000 overdrive build

😀

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-11-10, 07:19:
Thought I'd be smart and install DOS 7.1 to get support for larger partitions, alas, I soon discovered that my Intel socket 7, M […]
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Thought I'd be smart and install DOS 7.1 to get support for larger partitions, alas, I soon discovered that my Intel socket 7, MMX 200, LT430TX board doesn't support drives over 8GB. So what's the best workaround for this:

  • Look for a BIOS hack
  • Get a PCI IDE card and use SD to IDE
  • Get a PCI SATA card and use a SSD
  • Run two 8GB SD cards with 7.1 and give up large support
  • Be a heathen and keep running 6.22 and grieve I can't install every PC game there is

The board supports PCI 2.1, so I guess the controller can't be above that. The solution also doesn't need the ability to boot as I'll use an SD/CF solution for a boot drive and the larger for games only, but I'd want at least 64GB for my D: drive.

DIY Bios Modding guide Jan Steunebrink k6-2+/3+ 128gb

Sphere's PCB projects.
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Sphere’s socket 5/7 cpu collection.
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SUCCESSFUL K6-2+ to K6-3+ Full Cache Enable Mod
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Tyan S1564S to S1564D single to dual processor conversion (also s1563 and s1562)