First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all
As some of you may know, I recently got an all-in-one 486dx2 Compaq Presario 433. The system came with a WD Caviar 2420 disk with 423,5 MB. I tried replacing it with a Quantum Fireball 2.5a IDE disk (2,5 GB), but it doesn't really work. Here are my steps:
1) First the machine gave me a "disk controller error". I thought it was some sort of vendor lock-in.
2) Then I read about DOS having a 2 GB partition limit and figured that maybe the problem was that 2.5a was used for a Windows 98SE and as such, it was formatted as FAT32 single partition. Used my Socket 7 machine to reformat it as a single FAT partition within the 2GB limit. Still nothing.
3) Then I've read this guide to picking a disk for a DOS system. It says that some old BIOS-es don't recognise partitions larger than 500MB. Tried removing all partitions from the disk. The MS-DOS installation floppy worked, but the system took all the disk space to create a single 405 MB partition (just like it did on a WD 2420). No additional partitions could be added without removing the DOS-created one.
4) Then I've tried to use Partition Magic 4 on my Windows 98SE to create a 405 MB primary and 2 GB extended partition. MS-DOS did boot and actually installed to the primary partition, but the system couldn't boot off it. No "replace system disk" messages, no errors, just a blank screen.
5) Then I've tried the same thing, but I used the fdisk from MS-DOS 6.22 to reformat the primary partition. Still, the system installs, but I still get a black screen.
What do I do? I want to use as much of 2,5 GB as possible.
Thanks!
