200G Hard Drive

[Guest]

Folks:


Recently bought a 200G hard drive and slapped it into an older machine.
This older machine can only recognize 36 G of the HD.

* How can I force this older machine to recognize the entire 200 G
capacity of the hard drive ?

Someone suggested that I use some sort of controller
card.

Is this true & if so explain briefly
how the controller card solves the problem?



Thanks,
Jo.

 

[JS]

Just how old is the PC. Make, model and any other useful info would be of
help please.

JS

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

You need to format it in NTFS format. You also need to have LBA enabled in
the BIOS and have SP2 installed.

 

[Bob Knowlden]

The IDE controller card has its own BIOS, so it doesn't depend on your
mainboard to detect the larger drive.

It may also be possible to use "drive overlay" software to allow the old PC
to use the full capacity of the drive. It's included with the drive if its a
retail package, and usually made available for download if the drive is a
bare one. I've never used overlay software; I believe that it only works in
Windows, so you may have trouble with DOS-based utility software (Partition
Magic, True Image, etc.).

Some months ago, I stuck a Promise Ultra100TX2 card in each of a couple of
ancient Dell PCs at work (166 MHz Pentium 1, 430HX chipset). That was to get
the machines to work with 40 GB drives. Worked well, including the NT4
install. (I needed to use the F6 trick during the installation, to install
the Promise drivers on a new boot drive.) Aside from a few extra seconds of
startup time, there are no obvious down sides. The Ultra100TX2 is an old
design, but it supports LBA48 drives (>137 GB) with sufficiently new
firmware.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.