Does anyone have experience of upgrading hard drive on Packard Bell?

[dps]

I have a packard Bell Pentium 166mhz with a 3.2GB. I need more disk space desparatley. In past I had bought a 20GB disk to use as a secondary drive but the BIOS was not reading much of it (only 8GB I think). I can give further details about the model if required. If there is a BIOS limitation what is the maximum I can upgrade to? Is there a workaround(aprt from dumping this pc)??

I am particularly keen to hear from people who have carried out upgrades successfully.

Rgds,,


Derek

 

[dps]

Ps. If there are utilities out there to meant to allow for upgrade(i.e. ddisk etc), do they actually work or are there problems?

rgds,,

Derek

 

[brendanhedges]

most old pc's only recognise HDD up to 8gig. this doesn't mean that your 20gig drive cant be used.
i am affraid i havent personnel experiance with the HP but if you where to do some digging on HP's site.(

http://www.hp.com)you

will proberbly find a utility that you can install that will force windows to recognise the whole 20 gigs.
i have IBM deskstars in my machine and i know IBM have these utilities as a free download. if HP doesnt have any then maybe you could try the IBM one. it may work.
another thought is to manualy set the clyinders etc for your HDD in bios and see if this works.


hope this helps a little

brendan

 

[sehiser]

You can do it no problem. You can't really flash the BIOS though. You have to use the BIOS overlay software that came with the HDD. There is a company that makes new BIOS's but they are $80 or so. On a packard bell system I've probably done the upgrade you are talking about 400+ times and never really had any problems I wouldn't run into on any other type of system. It's not a question about being a PB, but installing a large drive on an older system with limitation. Before drives got to be this size you could split the number of heads and double the sectors in the BIOS and get it to recognize a larger drive.

Just use the overlay software, it works, I don't like it but sometimes you don't have a choice unless you want to spend some money. Considering you can get a whole new motherboard for less than $80 there would be no point in my mind for you to order a new BIOS for a home computer.

 

[edfair]

The way the system was put together will probably keep you from replacing the M/B by itself. So if you go that direction plan on replacing the M/B and the case/PS. Most of the rest is usable. But you may also need a video card and possibly keyboard and mouse.
The drive overlay that reassigns head/track info is from on-track systems. If you use it, make sure you keep a floppy with the overlay installed for emergency boot. And you may run into little glitches installing stuff from the supplied reload CD.
Does your bios allow LBA addressing of the hard drive? This normally allows more space to be assigned than normal or large which are two other choices of drive addressing scheme. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[dps]

Thanks all for the feedback.

How can I get into the BIOS Overlay software?

With respects to splitting the number of heads and doubling the sectors in the BIOS; well I did the following steps to find out what I have configured : - (Please bare in mind the last time I attempted to upgrade with the 20gb was ages ago, hence cannot recall how, what, when and where; also had info. on HDD upgrade utilities which cannot locate)

- I did F1
- went into IDE device configuration -->
cylinders 6163, heads 16, sectors 63 and maximum capacity reads as 3020mb. So I assume the above suggestions are to manually change these values - here or somewhere else??

with respect to my BIOS allowing LBA addressing? - how can I find this out as I cannot recall how to do this?

Thanks in advance

 

[edfair]

One way on later bios's is to let it do auto select. Another way is to do IDE drive detect, where you get to choose normal , large, or LBA. But you may not have the capability.
Basically would takey your 6000x16x63 to something like 2000x256x63, But it requires the LBA capability on both ends.
And there is also a choice to make further into bios setup to allow LBA addressing if your system has the capability.
By the time of P133s, most MBs had the LBA as a choice.
Try a google search for Ontrack. This also does some jiggling that will get you more of the drive used. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[spazzo]

I am writing this on a Packard Bell Pentium II that now has two hard drives: a 13 gb and a 20 gb. My hubby is the expert who advises that you will need a controller card because your motherboard won't handle anything over about 6 gb.

Theoretically, after you put in a controller card you should be ok ( it comes with software), but if it doesn't want to work you might have to run Fdisk. BUT he says that with a Pentium I he's not sure your motherboard will handle a 20GB HD (it may only take 13 GB) even with a controller card. You may need to upgrade to an ATX motherboard, Pentium II or faster, or get a newer computer.
We also found that it was really hard to upgrade PB software. He replaced my original PB stuff with Windows ME.

 

[dps]

Thank you for that 'Spazzo' - but what is this controller card and its software and where can I get hold of it?

If I can get it here in UK then I do not mind spending a few pounds for the sake of hard disk upgrade.

Any further details would be very much appreciated as since my original message I have not upgraded and despartely need more space. I tried the above suggestion but with little luck.

Thanks in advance

 

[tlcscousin]

I run a Promise technology Ultra ATA 100 controller PCI card.You pop it into an empty PCI slot boot and when windows finds it put the included disk into the floppy drive and load the drivers.This allows up to four more IDE components.