11 Aug
2008
11 Aug
'08
12:32 p.m.
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