[Ham-Computers] RE: HD Problems.

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

How old is the computer?  I doubt that it would be so old as to not support >8GB drives, but it's possible.

As Jeff mentioned, make sure the system is configured to access the drive in LBA mode (Logical Block Addressing).  This mode circumvents the drive size limitation of CHS mode - the drive still reports CHS if requested by older operating systems.  Most systems made in the past 10 years or so have an "auto-detect" drive type - this is what your system should be set to and it should detect LBA.

Another thought is that you've run into a different drive size limitation of older systems - the 32GB limit.  This would explain why your system only sees 8GB - the drive size "wraps" at 32GB and the OS only sees the amount 32GB (or multiples of 32GB).

Here's a link to an in-depth description of the various drive size limits:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm


Here's another thought...when Win98SE was installed, was the "chipset support" drives for the motherboard also installed?  If not, then you might want to try installing them and any IDE controller specific driver, if applicable.  For example, Intel chipset based motherboards use the Intel Chipset INF Update.  VIA-based motherboards use the "4-in-1" or "Hyperion" drivers.  SIS-based motherboards use several seperate driver updates for each motherboard component (AGP, IDE, Southbridge, etc).  Until you have the chipset support (and the IDE driver) installed, the system won't be running as efficiently as possible and some devices may not even work or show up in the Device Manager (e.g. cascaded devices where one device is attached to another "root" device that hasn't been properly installed yet).

If you can provide additional details about the motherboard, I can provide links to chipset drivers.  One more thought...make sure the drive itself doesn't have a jumper to limit the drive size...some manufacturers inclue this "manual override" for compatibility.


As to the other things:

Modem:
Not uncommon for Windows to detect the modem as a generic 2400 baud modem - this is the least common denominator and the 2400bps modem driver works with most modems.  Once you've installed the USR specific driver, it should properly detect it as a USR modem.

CHS vs LBA:
Cylinder / Head / Sector - the original way to describe the geometry of a drive.  When the OS needed a data, it would request the specific sector using CHS (e.g. "give me the data at Cylinder 22, Head 1, Sector 15").

LBA - Logical Block Addressing - the data on the drive is accessed by block number vs CHS.  So the system would say "give me the data at LBA 4000" rather than the CHS number.  Simpler and bypasses the limitations of number of Cyls, Heads, and Sectors.  But, LBA also ran into a limit since the original spec used 28-bit numbers (limit of 137GB).  The updated spec now uses 48-bit addressing (144 PB).

8GB vs 7.85GB:
This is a "base" number issue.  Historic computing defines a "Byte" as a power of 2, 2^8 (an 8-bit number).  As such, 1KB = 1024 Bytes, 1MB = 1,048,576 Bytes (1024x1024), and 1GB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes (1024^3).  At some point in time, some drive manufacturer's "marketing" department decided to "one up" the other by inferring that their drives were higher in capacity by using a base 10 number to describe their drive.  Therefore, an 18.2GB drive (in binary numbering) becomes a 20 Billion Byte drive (rounded up).  Here's the math:

  1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 18.2 = 19,542,101,196 Bytes

This is where the confusion started and where it remains.  The drive size in binary is 18.2GB, but we've been conditioned to call this 20GB.  As the numbers get larger, the parity in size increases.  For example, what is quoted as a 137 Billion Byte drive is actually a 128GB drive.  Can you see now why companies would prefer to show you the larger number?  It "seems" like you're getting 9 extra gigs of drive space, but the true is that the values are the same - 128GB = 137 Billion Bytes.  If you look carefully at a "boxed" hard drive on a store shelf, you'll see somewhere the disclosure where they define a GB as "billion bytes".

So, if you want to determine the binary size of that brand new multi-hundred gigabyte drive you just bought, divide the number by 1.048576 to get a better idea of what what DOS/Windows and other operating systems will show.  That "500" GB drive will be closer to 476GB.


Anyways...73!

  - Aaron, NN6O