> hi all:
>
> well at ong last i got someone oer here with eyes who could look
> at what my bios really says.
Hi Karen,
I'm pretty much of a lurker but I've got to say I admire your
determination to ferret out the secrets of your computer. Even with the
benefit of sight, that can be a frustrating experience. From what I can
gather from your post, you are trying to get your computer to recognize
the full capacity of your hard drive. Without reviewing everything
you've done so far, I'd like to make a couple of observations from my
experience.
One - if your CMOS (BIOS) reports the correct size of your hard drive
and supports LBA (Large Block Addressing?) Then you are home free
provided that you use an FDISK utility that also supports the large disk
sizes. If your BIOS does not support LBA then a BIOS upgrade is
necessary to access the full capacity of the disk. Software BIOS
upgrades can be simple but can also blow up in your face leaving you
unable to access your hard drive or anything else (always save your old
bios - just in case). BIOS programs work at the command prompt level -
do you have some means of working at that level?
Two - If it comes down to a choice between making multiple partitions
and installing an overlay program, I'd avoid the overlay program. I have
installed the overlay program on a number of older computers and found
that while it CAN work all right in limited circumstances, more often
than not it was the source of headaches that evaporated when it was
removed. An example: I have a 286 with an 850 Meg hard drive. It runs
Windows 3.1 in Standard mode. When I used the overlay program to access
the full 850 megs it locked up unmercifully even when using the provided
Windows 3.1 driver. I removed the overlay and fdisked it to the 540 meg
DOS limit and it is happily running Windows and Workgroup for DOS.
So my conclusion for you would be to find out if your BIOS supports LBA
then use an operating system that supports LBA (DOS 6.22 or 7.0 -
anybody know?). Avoid the overlay unless you absolutely have no choice
for what you want to do.
This is just my opinion, of course - your mileage may vary.
Dave R.
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