I have a old PC going again with a PT2006 board with a 166 pentium and a wopping 16megs of ram lol. Anyway properties on the hard drive list it at half full and size as 503mb, it is in fact a old 12 gig bigfoot. Is this because of the old BIOS or do I have it partitioned wrong? I thought there was a way to fool these old machines into using the bigger hard drives. It had two really small hard drives before, so small there wasn't enough room to install win98 se. I hope I don't have to Fdisk and reinstall everthing to make it work at 12 gig or will it never run at 12 gig? Tom
Old PC sees 12 gig HDD as 503mb
- Thread starter TomW
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Partitioning it wrongly shouldn't affect the way the Bios sees the drive. Pre-pentium systems (ie 486s) had a limit of 528MB as the max size they would recognize.
This shouldn't be the case with a P166 but I suspect it does have a limit of either 2.1GB or 8GB.
You might be able to download a utility from the hard disk manufacturer (such as ontrack) that will allow your system to see all of the drive
This shouldn't be the case with a P166 but I suspect it does have a limit of either 2.1GB or 8GB.
You might be able to download a utility from the hard disk manufacturer (such as ontrack) that will allow your system to see all of the drive
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Ok. Here's the Deal. The reason your OS is only seeing 503MB of a 12GIG IDE Quantum Bigfoot is because that motherboard the FIC PT-2006
has a very old BIOS that doesn't support the newest (LBA or ECHS). Which allows your OS to properly recognize the correct size of your harddrive. When this BIOS was made there weren't HDD's larger than 504MB. Back in the old days... LOL Your CPU the Pentium 166MHz is a SOCKET 7 CPU. That really doesn't matter here.
I did a little searching and came up with this page from FIC website.
http://www.fic.com.tw/support/motherboard/motherboard.aspx?model_id=91
The only thing you could do to fix this problem would be to FLASH the BIOS with a newer updated BIOS that has LBA/ECHS support. Unfortunately from what I saw, that MOBO doesn't have a BIOS update. There are a bunch of utilities that they have but i'm not sure if they will help you.
LOL - I'd find a sledgehammer and have some fun... IMO
has a very old BIOS that doesn't support the newest (LBA or ECHS). Which allows your OS to properly recognize the correct size of your harddrive. When this BIOS was made there weren't HDD's larger than 504MB. Back in the old days... LOL Your CPU the Pentium 166MHz is a SOCKET 7 CPU. That really doesn't matter here.
I did a little searching and came up with this page from FIC website.
http://www.fic.com.tw/support/motherboard/motherboard.aspx?model_id=91
The only thing you could do to fix this problem would be to FLASH the BIOS with a newer updated BIOS that has LBA/ECHS support. Unfortunately from what I saw, that MOBO doesn't have a BIOS update. There are a bunch of utilities that they have but i'm not sure if they will help you.
LOL - I'd find a sledgehammer and have some fun... IMO
LOL, I know it probably came over on the Mayflower, I got it for nothing and have nothing in it. I just want to use it for some basic games for when kids come over or whoever wants to use it, its not online or anything and it seems to work for what I want so I guess I will just leave it. I do have a quantum disk program, I don't know if this would make any difference, would I have to loose all the info on the drive to use such a program? Tom
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