Old 486 Laptop - New 5.1 GB Hard Drive Problem

[Dee]

I've been given an old 486 laptop and have put windows 95 ORS2 on it - but
the system only saw the first 500MB or so if the hard drive - I thought
Partition Magic would see the rest but it hasn't - there is an option that
says LBA support above 512MB - it was disbaled now I've enbabled it but no
difference.

I seem to remember having the same problem with an old 486 desktop and a guy
at a computer company made me a floppy disk that installed some kind of
driver or something that allowed me to see bigger hard drives - but I can't
remember what it was called.

My drive is a Hitachi and the Laptop is unbranded with BIOS from 1994.

Any ideas?

 

[Dee]

I've been given an old 486 laptop and have put windows 95 ORS2 on it - but
the system only saw the first 500MB or so if the hard drive - I thought
Partition Magic would see the rest but it hasn't - there is an option that
says LBA support above 512MB - it was disbaled now I've enbabled it but no
difference.

I seem to remember having the same problem with an old 486 desktop and a guy
at a computer company made me a floppy disk that installed some kind of
driver or something that allowed me to see bigger hard drives - but I can't
remember what it was called.

My drive is a Hitachi and the Laptop is unbranded with BIOS from 1994.

Any ideas?

I should add that I can see the full drive size in the BIOS - so can't see
why if it says 5gb in the BIOS I can't see the full size in Partition Magix
or Fdisk - does the drive need reformating??

 

[Rod Speed]

Thats normally because you dont have LBA enabled.

Nothing PM can do about that if its not enabled.

You normally need to start over, delete the partition
and recreate it. If you are doing that with fdisk, it
will ask if you want large hard drive support.

That approach will work, but its better to enable LBA instead.

You can get the bios overlay, what you are calling the driver,
from the Hitachi site, but its better to enable LBA if you can.

I should add that I can see the full drive size in the BIOS

Yes, that problem with only 500MB or so of the drive being visible
is an OS level problem. Thats why the full size is visible in the bios.

- so can't see why if it says 5gb in the BIOS I can't see the full size
in Partition Magix or Fdisk - does the drive need reformating??

Yes, enable LBA, delete the existing partition, create it again and format it.

That should allow you to see the full size of the drive.