hard drive help please

[zuko1]

Hi i have an old comaq desktop pro running a pentium2 @333mhz. I would like to know the largest harddrive i could install on this pc please. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Edited December 31, 2006 by zuko1

[McTavish]

Natively I would say 8gig. You would need to go to the Compaq website and search for your exact model and see what the last bios update supported – then update yours if need be. It could be possible you could get up to 32gig.

Perhaps an add in controller card or DDO (dynamic drive overly) could increase this. http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/...ve_barriers.htm

[Petr]

I don't know Compaq but all Gigabyte motherboards for PII processors (GA-686LX, GA-686BX series) had BIOS upgrade with HDD support up to 137 GB. Sometimes it is good to read release notes or changelog to BIOS updates.

Petr

[LLXX]

Probably 2TB, using Enable48BitLBA.

How much storage do you need anyway?

Edited January 1, 2007 by LLXX

[MGadAllah]

Probably 2TB

are you serious, pentium2 @333mhz can read that much or you were just joking

[LLXX]

It'd sure take a long time to format though... but I don't doubt it can handle it with at most a bit of BIOS modding.

Fact: All processors since the '386 could address up to 4GB of physical RAM.

[MGadAllah]

does there is any HD out there = or near 2 TB

[ZaPbUzZ]

Dynamic Drive overlay allows all hard drives to work on all limitations - just uses a portion of memory to load itself into bios each boot.

[LLXX]

does there is any HD out there = or near 2 TB

Yes. 2TB 5.25" full-height server drives (SCSI). They're rare and expensive (several thousand USD each).

If you mean 3.5" desktop SATA/IDE drives, Seagate currently has a 750GB model.

[Ponch]

Seagate currently has a 750GB model.

So that's 2 years waiting for the drive to come out and a few hours to format it. Negligeable .

Or maybe 1 minute "quick format" with Ranish.

I'd guess that Compaq 333MHz could handle 32Gig out of the box and probably 137Gb with a Bios update. Note that those Dynamic Drive Overlay program do not work in 100% of the cases. I had a portable (Armada 166MHz) that Compaq claimed could handle 4Gig wit a Bios update. Some folks on a forum said they used a 6 gig without problem, I tried a 20Gig but could never use it. It was detected as 20Gig in Bios, 8 gig by fdisk, format /s OK, but never booted. Even with maxtor's utilities. I tried all the possibilities. Got an other one (5gig) and it was OK.

[MGadAllah]

If you mean 3.5" desktop SATA/IDE drives, Seagate currently has a 750GB model.

I think I may store a human with this capacity

[zuko1]

Hi and thanx for the replies. I tried a 15 gig hard drive out of another of my pc's but all i got was NTSDL missing(or something like that) Tried a 40 gig hd and got the same message. then tried a 1/2 gig hd running windows 95 and that worked. how can i get the 15 or 40 gig hd to work on this pc? I'v been into setup but there isn't many options like on most pc's.

Thanx for all your help.

[Ponch]

NTLDR missing does not necessarilly mean that the drive i not recognized. Did you check the jumper settings ?

+Bios update is not an "option" in Setup, it is the replacement of the whole Setup program. You should find a download on Compaq.com for your specific model (very important) that lets you create one or 2 diskettes with explanations on "how to". Most the time, you boot from a diskette and launch a command that refers to a .bin file. That file overwrites your Bios wit a new version.

[Drugwash]

Please try a search at Wim's BIOS board, maybe they have something for you. If you can't find your BIOS/Computer model in any of the topics, you may open a request thread.

[LLXX]

NTLDR missing does not necessarilly mean that the drive i not recognized. Did you check the jumper settings ?

+Bios update is not an "option" in Setup, it is the replacement of the whole Setup program. You should find a download on Compaq.com for your specific model (very important) that lets you create one or 2 diskettes with explanations on "how to". Most the time, you boot from a diskette and launch a command that refers to a .bin file. That file overwrites your Bios wit a new version.

Quite the contrary.

"NTLDR is missing" means the drive is partitioned and working, only it was formatted with NT (and likely NTFS) so it contains the standard NT bootsector which looks for and loads NTLDR. If it was formatted in DOS/9x, the similar message would be "Invalid system disk.\nReplace the disk, and then press any key."

Recommendation: Repartition with FDISK and format with FORMAT.