286/SLT and HDDs

Good news, after dremeling the Dallase RTC and performing minor surgery to add an external coin cell battery, the 286/SLT is not complaining at me on boot. Double bonus, the 21.4MB HDD looks to be operational and boots to DOS Triple bonus, the diag disk I made works, and cleaned up all of the errors from not having a battery for so long. Quadruple bonus, I've temporarily connected a 40GB 2.5" drive, fdisked (to 528MB), formatted, and booted off said drive (regular 3.5" drives suck too much power and just overwhelmed the little PSU in the machine, even newer 160GB eco-models.) So, my questions: Is there any value in keeping the larger drive in the unit? I would like to install Windows 3.1, DOS, some utils, etc., and I don't know if all that will spill out of 21MB or not. If the larger drive is in the unit, what would be suggestions on accessing the rest of the disk? I assume DOS will never see more than 528MB, since I had to tell the BIOS it was a COMPAQ drive type 42, which is 528MB. I thought maybe Windows could see the rest of the space once out of real mode, or maybe using the DOS from Win95 and formatting FAT32 might help. I remember there being drive extenders at some point, but I never used one (thankfully, all of my machines understood LBA). Thoughts appreciated. Permanently replacing the 21MB drive means doing some soldering on the little funky power cable used in the unit, so I'd rather not mess with it unless there is some value to the additional space. Still, regardless, it lives, and research suggests the external KB connector is XT, so I can use this to test an AT->XT converter project I wanted to implement. Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com