So I have an old Packard Bell 80486-based system sitting around that I've gotten running again. I decided to max out the RAM, and figured since I was inside the case, should I upgrade the hard disk from a 545Mb to a 1056Mb while I'm at it? What do you all think?
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My AMD486 machine has a 256mb flash hard drive, so the technology is not period correct, but the size is, as my Toshiba T2100 from early 95 also with a 486 and 20mb of ram, has a 253mb hard drive.
If you don't care about period correctness, and think you are going to use up a gig of space on an old hobby machine, go for it.
The computer is from '95, the drive is from '96, so it is a period drive. If I do upgrade, it'll give me a little extra breathing room, but I would miss the crackling noise the original drive makes.
EDIT: RAM now upgraded from 8Mb to 40Mb, still debating on hard disk.
But it's a flash drive, so I could buy a larger one, and yeah.
I would like to get a real 500mb IDE hard drive, but those go for over $100, and I can't really justify that right now, maybe birthday money or some lucky break.
Here's one just like mine, but it's from the UK. eBay says it would cost about $75 American plus shipping, unsure about Canadian.
I don't know your Packard Bell 80486 supports 1GB of Hard Drive.
I used 10GB of HDD (From Seagate OEM HDD for XBOX) on 80486 based motherboard (Award BIOS)
It seems to be recognized as 1GB.
Of course no problem to use.
I selected the value as User Defined for HDD on BIOS.
But I wonder your 486 PC supports User Defined value on BIOS.
The hard drive has been upgraded and the newer drive works fine as a user-defined disk. Thanks for the input everybody.
C (Cylinder) : 1024
H (Head) : 255
S (Sector) : 63
Total amount : 1024*255*63*512 = 8,442,686,720 (About 8GB)
---> This is total amount of MS-DOS 6.x HDD partition.
Upper Limit on HDD (HDC) seems to be follows.
C (Cylinder) : 65536
H (Head) : 16
S (Sector) : 255
Total amount : 1024*255*63*512 = 136,902,082,560 (About 130.5GB)
If mother BIOS doesn't support LBA mode, Limitation of actual parameter is as follows.
C : 1024
H : 16
S : 63
Total amount : 1024*16*63*512 = 528,482,304 (504MB)
The BIOS was probably your problem. Yours is from Award, mine's from Phoenix Technologies. What's the date stamp on your BIOS?
I tested it with Award 80286 motherboard. It recognized as 504MB.
I think your 486 BIOS will not support LBA.
>The BIOS was probably your problem. Yours is from Award, mine's from Phoenix
I remember that my Award 486 motherboard seems to support LBA mode.
But the amount is limited to 1GB.
(Only 1GB size is recognized and used.)
http://motherboards.mbarron.net/specs.htm
A few of 486 motherboard supports LBA mode.
Unfortunately my 486 motherboard was already seladed.
(I use Pentium I and II PC instead.)
This is also good information.
Yes, you seem to be right.
My 486 mother can select both LBA and CHS translation mode.
OnTrack does work. As to the how, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_drive_overlay
I didn't try messing with my system over the weekend because I was lazy... Anyway, OnTrack fell down and took a dump on itself when I tried running it on my system.
Undeterred, I found another overlay program, one that actually worked! Program called MAXBLAST.EXE, runs under DOS or Win9x and makes a bootable diskette. Supposed to be for Maxtor drives but worked just fine on my Western Digital. Followed the simple instructions and now have access to a little over 6Gb of disk space! Installing Windows 95 OSR2.5 while making this post, very happy with the results so far. Thanks for the input everyone, especially you vbdasc and BlueSun.