11 Aug
2008
11 Aug
'08
4:14 p.m.
Remember there were also the utilities to fool the PC into using larger
sized disks, but I never liked those at all. Most hard drives in that
time period came with the Ontrack, EZDrive, Disk Manager, MaxBlast,
programs. The Disk Drive Oveylay programs do a software convert of the
BIOS settings and actual settings and make it boot/work, usually. These
altered the MBR to sit there, and these have their issues and were
always a last resort. The drives do NOT swap into other machines well,
and any issue, esp with the MBR would pretty much cause a FAIL.
Eric J Korpela wrote:
BIOS for early 486 machines usually included two user
defined disk
types, often the highest numbered types (maybe 47 and 48). These
allowed you to enter the number of cylinders heads and sectors. You
might not to be able to enter the actual geometry for your drive.
You'll probably be limited to 16 heads, 63 sectors and 1024 cylinders
(504MiB).
Whatever OS you install may be able to read the full disk capacity
from the drive and use it all (ignoring the BIOS settings), but all
files needed for booting will need to be below the 504 MiB boundary.
Eric
On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 2:11 PM, <Hollandia at ccountry.net> wrote:
> One of my machines is an old Packard-Bell Legend 610 machine, to which I am
> trying to fit a second hard drive.
>
> The machine will not recognize any modern (or semi-modern) hard drive I have
> attempted to fit. I have tried various master/slave combinations, to no avail.
>
> My guess is that this is due to the BIOS being of am early type. The BIOS
> chip is a socketed DIP package and the lettering on it is too faded to read.
> The screen boot-up display is this:
>
> PhoenixBIOS(TM) A486 Version 1.01
> PB400 OPTI 486WB
> Reference ID 08
>
> Is this a reasonable guess?
>
> If so, what might be done by way of a BIOS upgrade?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kurt
>
>
>