Hard Drive Upgrade

edited May 2017 in Hardware
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?

Comments

  • I don't know about you, but I'm all for period correctness. so I wouldn't do it, unless there were 1GB hard disks during that time.

    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.
  • @popeyewinter
    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.
  • your current hard drive, is still more than twice the size of mine.

    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.
  • Vintage hard disk listing

    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.
  • canadian right now is about 35 cents less than US, so take us and multiply it by 1.35 and you will sewhy I say they seem to be over $100.
  • Mind the 1024-cylinder (528Mb) barrier. Yet, if you can use the full capacity of the 545Mb disk, you shouldn't have problems with the bigger one, either.
  • Maybe it depends on BIOS and HDC.

    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 BIOS supports disks up to 2Gb. The 545Mb disk was user-defined.

    The hard drive has been upgraded and the newer drive works fine as a user-defined disk. Thanks for the input everybody.
  • IIRC, Upper Limit on BIOS seems to be follows. (Non LBA)

    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 works very well with the 1Gb drive, just had to manually input the drive parameters. The old disk has 1057 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. Don't remember what the newer disk has, and I don't want to pull the shell off this thing again.
    ibmpc5150 wrote:
    I used 10GB of HDD (From Seagate OEM HDD for XBOX) on 80486 based motherboard (Award BIOS)
    The BIOS was probably your problem. Yours is from Award, mine's from Phoenix Technologies. What's the date stamp on your BIOS?
  • edited April 2017
    Of course 80GB of IDE Hard Drive works on old PC well, hehehe.

    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.)
  • It looks like LBA is necessary to read disks larger than 500Mb. If this is true, my BIOS does support LBA, but is limited to 2Gb for some reason.
  • Yes it is good info. It seems my BIOS does support LBA. I guess the reason I can't use any more than 2 Gb is because the system was made for use with DOS which has the same limit.
  • Traditionally, there have been two BIOS modes for accessing >528Mb disks: LBA mode and "CHS translation mode" , a.k.a. "Large mode". The former always tops at 7.8Gb (unless int 13x is used), but the latter can be limited to 4, 2 or even 1 Gb, depending on the implementation. If your system has this 2Gb limitation, then it probably uses a "CHS translation mode", not the LBA mode.
  • Okay, after reading up some more, that is what I have. All this talk about modes and whatnot is relatively new to me, but at least now I have some kind of bearing on how the system works. Thanks for setting the record straight.
  • @vbdasc

    Yes, you seem to be right.
    My 486 mother can select both LBA and CHS translation mode.
  • I've been looking into a "drive overlay" program like OnTrack that's supposed to bypass the BIOS limitation. Does this really work, and if so how? If it can help make an even bigger disk work, I will try upgrading the disk again.
  • BigCJ wrote:
    I've been looking into a "drive overlay" program like OnTrack that's supposed to bypass the BIOS limitation. Does this really work, and if so how? If it can help make an even bigger disk work, I will try upgrading the disk again.

    OnTrack does work. As to the how, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_drive_overlay
  • Okay, here's a report on what I've been up to.

    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.
  • Interesting. MAXBLAST is OEM licensed from Ontrack.
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