Size of hard drive PC can handle?

[eubie]

to comment on this. I put a 120hd in my 3y.o. comp. I was able to transfer eveything over and it works fine. The only prob is that my comp or mobo only reads 111 gb instead of 120gb. I have the original in there too that is 20gb. I think there something about the mobo and how much hd gb is can reconize. I would like to get my other 9 gb if someone could tell me it's possible and how to do it.

That is the correct size. You see harddrive makers use the decimal form of measuring bits and bytes. We see the drives measured in the binary form of measurment. When you measure in decimal, a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000bytes. So to the harddrive makers a 120GB harddrive can hold 120 1,000,000,000 pieces of information.

Your OS uses binary measurment where one gigabyte is 1,073,741,824. This is why your harddrive shows up as 111GB.

Decimal: 1,000,000,000X120=120GB
1,000,000,000X111=111GB

Binary: 1,073,741,824X120=128GB(approx)
1,073,741,824X111=119GB(approx)

 

[TomW]

Hello again, I think I got it down right, the BIOS says AWARD v4.51PG. Does anyone know if this was the last update they had for the M5ALA ? What would be a good brand of mother board to look at getting to update this pile some. Are most Biostar boards as weak as this one? What would be a good board to upgrade to that will fit in place of a M5ALA and be good enough to handle win2000 or XP? What type of CPU mounting is the most common the last couple years. From what I can tell socket 7 must be a dead horse now. I am not looking for some brand new top line board but something I can maybe find used on Ebay or a computer shop and won't cost to much. I don't mean to start a brand war here, I just want something that will fit my case and work decent and hook up to my power supply and have a decent amount of plug in slots and handle a 20 to 30GB hard drive, and some of the more common CPUs. Is this even possible or am I dreaming on this one. [please don't tell me to junk the thing. it is kinda fun learning on this pile and so far it hasn't cost alot.] It works good again right now but it is so finicky I hate to download things on it because I never know how it will act plus it still has a quantum bigfoot hard drive [6GB] the last working one I have. I think the seagate hard rive is kinda old to but if its anything like the small one in the old Packard Bell PC I have It will work good for a long time. TomW

 

[TomW]

Hello, I think I am figuring out part of my problem is with Norton 2002, Seems when I run live update off the norton page it makes PC act weird. They have some new things that get installed from update, I will just pick virus updates and security updates and not let it install all the other stuff. I just had to uninstall the norton and start all over, now its acting OK again for now.

OK, I did some mother board shopping on Ebay last night and found a Gateway Midway P4 3.6+ microATX 4000820 mother board, socket 487, intel i865 chipset, ATA 33/66/100/133/150, buy it now for $55.00 + shipping, I would have to check again but I think it has built in sound and video. Would a board like this be a good one to rebuild this PC and get rid of that dam M5ALA? TomW


I also slowed down the M5ALA to 83MHz and put in the Cyrix Logic CPU I got with the used board, Its 83MHz x 3 on multiplier to see if that makes it work any better than the AMD K6-2 /500 set at 100 MHz x 5. TomW