Topic: Bios limitations of hard drive size

[Sandra]

I am wanting to fit a bigger hard drive into an old pc that Lona kindly gave me a few weeks back so it would be more useful for a cousin of mine.
Its a Patriot with a GVC FR 500 motherboard and currently only has a 2.1 gig drive.
I cant find any details about a bios upgrade that mentions increasing drive capacity.
Nor can I find anything saying what its limit is.
I have however just found a nice little utility called EXTBIOS from :
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/bioslim.htm#Int13ext
which says that it will take greater than 8gig

Harddisk 1: Int 13h extensions version 2.1 detected.
 Subset supported: Extended disk access support (for > 8GB) : Yes
                   Drive locking and ejecting support       : No
                   Enhanced Disk Drive (EDD) support        : Yes
 Device features : DMA boundary errors handled transparently: No
                   Device supports write with verify        : No
                   Media is removable                       : No
Addressable geometry (CHS) is 521x128x63 Cylinders-Heads-Sectors/track
 A total of 4201344 Sectors of 512 Bytes (2051 MB) are addressable in LBA

I assume that the last part is reading the actual drive installed at the moment.
What I would like to know is if anyone knows of a similar utility that will determine if the bios will take up to 32 gig which I should think would be its absolute limit or if anyone knows how big a hard drive this would take  

[Dack]

Usual software to use is ontrack or maxblast. These do what you need and hook the bios to allow much bigger drives to be used. Depending on the drive manufacturer you should be able to download the relevant software from their websites.

What it comes down to is you configure the drive as something the motherboard can support and then use a boot disk to install a specialy modified sector to the hard drive which then contains the code that does the translation. After it is done you have a drive that is handled correctly by the bios and all the space can be used.

[Sandra]

Thanks Dack, I did that with an old pc of mine to get it to run a 40 gig drive.
Unfortunately I decided to try dual booting with 98 and XP and there was a conflict with the drive software that messed it up so I ended up having to flash the bios to overcome that one.
Would you think that if it was ok, as that utility said, at greater than 8gig then it would be ok up to the next normal limit of 32 gig without using any software to enable the whole drive to be used ?

[Sandra]

Ok, problem solved, I found a bios upgrade to allow it to see up to 128 gig so I will probably stick a 40 gig in now as that should be enough for my cousin for now