HDD size/detection problem

Linc

My friend has an old 200MHz machine (Kingdom brand, I couldn't even begin to tell you the specs) and bought a 120 GB hard drive to go with it. As you can imagine, the system is not very happy about this and refuses to find the hard drive. If I make, say, a 5 GB partition and load Windows onto that, should that solve the detection problem?

GHoosdum

There's a jumper you can set on the hard drive, for "cylinder limitation." This will allow you to use the HDD's full size, and still have it recognized by the older PC... but it will recognize it smaller than it is.

Spinner

On a system that old, you may find the motherboard just can't properly detect a drive of that size. However you best shot, is too check for a BIOS update for it, however I imagine the motherboard will simply not have the necessary ability to run such a drive.

The simplest way around this is to buy a PCI ATA controller card and use that to run the hard drive instead.

Riddick

creating a partition and formatting it on a newer computer that can detect the bigger HDD will make the older computer be able to properly recognize the HDD and utilize all of its space. ive done this with a couple of 40 gbs and 80gbs that didnt like my friends old PC. the windows installation must of course be done on the PC u want the HDD to be in.

cheers

Linc

Thanks for the help, guys. I had to coach him over the phone. He couldn't find a jumper setting in the manual for cylinder limitation, and I couldn't try to talk him through flashing the BIOS cold No controller card either.

I tried getting win2k setup to format the disk into some 5-gig bitesize pieces, but to no avail.

After all this, I found out he is replacing the rest of the system in a month, so I told him to put the old 4 gig drive back in and just deal with that until he gets a new one Sheesh.