shanenin Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 I just picked up a computer that is about 5 years old. does the limit of 137 gb have anything to do with the OS(a windows problem?), or is this just to do with the bios. I do plan on running linux on it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
p0ize Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 If by 137GB hard drive limits,, its a BIOS issue. Windows/Linux wont restrict HDD size. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
murtu52 Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 If by 137GB hard drive limits,, its a BIOS issue. Windows/Linux wont restrict HDD size. No, Windows does limit harddrive size to my understanding; Linux, i'm not so sure about. I think windows 98 can't handle anything above 60GB, windows 2000 anything above 200GB, and I think window XP can handle up to a terabyte (I received this info at CompUSA; its been some time, so i may be wrong).However, the motherboard does have limits. Just like RAM Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Zero Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 I said windows will not retrict size because the odds of someone running a 1 terabyte let alone 200gb on a windows drive (on a 5 year old pc let alone) is rare unless a) running a server major movie pirate hehe.Its not Windows itself per se that restricts it. 98 I believe is 137GB but that is because of the Microsoft disk setup tools, FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM. Those are what restrict it if memory serves correctly.edit - i logged in with the wrong name haha. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
murtu52 Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 I see....But, shanenin won't have a problem with this because linux will be running on this machine...Harddrive space won't really be a problem for you, as long as the processor and RAM meet the requirements, i say go full steam ahead. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
iccaros Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 for you its a BIOS issue.. but a ide card will fix that.. you can get a ide PCI card for cheep ($30)and not use the ones on the board.. also new dives come with software that you can use to partitoin the drive.. its loads a preloaded on the harddrive.. showes to the Bios at the Bios limits but translates so the Os can use it at full size Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted March 23, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 I would not prefer to spend 30 dollars on an ide card. If I purchase an oem drive, without software, am I pretty much screwed? what about flashing the bios to a newer verision, would that help?if anyone cares to look, this is the link to the computerhttp://support.gateway.com/support/srt/doc...p?sn=0018537998 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
iccaros Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 "AMD K7 750 Megahertz processor with 512 K cache"I don't think the K7 had a harddrive limitation.. it uses LBA48 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted March 23, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 "AMD K7 750 Megahertz processor with 512 K cache"I don't think the K7 had a harddrive limitation.. it uses LBA48I did not realize that the proccessor had anything to do with harddrive limitation. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mikeyb Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 Hi there,regarding MAX HDD limits,The limits imposed by the Hard Disk Drive InterfaceThe Hard Disk Drive in the first IBM PC/XT Computer had 306 Tracks (Cylinders), four (4) Heads reading four surfaces on two platters, and used 17 Sectors per track. 306 x 17 x 4 x 512 Bytes per Sector gave a capacity of 10,370 KBytes.However on the newer IDE Hard Disk Drive Interface, and the universal device interface, SCSI, do not need to know about the numbers of Heads and Cylinders, as they are designed quite differently. They are only concerned with the total number of Sectors on the Hard Disk Drive.Limits imposed by the BIOSThe BIOS (Basic Input Output Services) provides disk services via a software interrupt service routine, Int 13 hex.. These services were originally designed for Floppy Disk Drives, and this is the cause of many of the limits. Three eight bit registers are used to store the Track, Head and Sector detail. The CH is used to store the Track number, the DH register stores the Head number and the CL register is used to store the Sector number. Eight binary bits can represent 256 values, so this means this BIOS service routine can support up to 256 Tracks, 256 Heads, and 256 Sectors per track. The above organisation would give a capacity of over 8 GByte, not a bad insight for 1982, when Hard Disk Drives small enough to fit inside a PC Computer were just becoming a reality. The only problem was the arrangement was wrong, a Drive with more than 16 heads is impractical and even the first Hard Disk Drives had more than 256 cylinders.This BIOS imposed limitation was overcome by modifying the Int 13 routine for Hard Disk Drives. The use of the CL and CH registers was changed. The low six bits of the CL register stored the number of sectors and the extra two bits not used in CL were tacked onto the front of the 8 bits in the CH register to give 10 bits for the number of cylinders. This means the Int 13 routine, when working with Hard Disk Drives, could recognise a maximum of 1023 Tracks, a maximum of 63 Sectors per track, and a maximum of 256 Heads (sides). The 1023 Track barrier is a problem as modern drives can have as many as 5000 Cylinders.One way to overcome the problem is to not tell DOS the drives real configuration. Rather than saying there are 2000 Cylinders and four Heads, we say they have 1000 Cylinders and eight Heads. The resulting capacity is the same, and the process is called TRANSLATION. Remember we are using the terms Cylinder and Track almost interchangeably here, a Track is a single track on one side of a platter, a Cylinder refers to all the Tracks on one plane.The last layer in the path between the disk and the user is the Operating System and DOS and Windows have their own size limitations. The major limitation here is caused by the Boot Record. The boot record is located in the first sector of track one on a Hard Disk Drive and contains a record of the disks format and a short boot strap loader routine. DOS versions up to 3.31 set aside two bytes (16 bits) for a record of the total number of sectors per logical drive. Under these earlier DOS versions, a large drive could be split into a number of logical drives by the FDISK command (each must be 32 MByte or less) and this made it possible to use drives larger than 32 MByte with these DOS versions.The 16 bit limit on the total number of sectors meant a Hard Disk Drive could have a maximum of 65,536 sectors, a total capacity of 32 MByte. (65536 sectors x 512 bytes per sector) DOS 3.1 and later removed this limit by setting aside four bytes for the total number of sectors and the 32 bit number produced can describe a two Tera Byte disk size.Here is a table describing where the original IDE specifications 528 MByte limit came from. The maximum capacity limits of IDE Hard Disk Drives was the combination of the lowest values for each parameter across the four layers of communication.the next 3 lists show the following...Limit imposed by the Int13 routine...Limits imposed by the IDE interface...Limit on the original IDE specificationMaximum sectors per track 63 255 63Maximum number of heads 255 16 16Maximum number of cylinders 1024 65536 1024Maximum capacity 8.4GB 136.9GB 528MBYou are also correct regarding OS's that will have a limit as well, for instance you cannot stick a 120GB drive onto a win98 machine as it is running a FAT32 partition, however, there are ways around this, download the maxblast 3 software and it bypasses hard drive limitations. well i think i waffled on enough.. and I hope this was not too boring for you good luck with the drive.Mikeyb Quote Link to post Share on other sites
iccaros Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 "AMD K7 750 Megahertz processor with 512 K cache"I don't think the K7 had a harddrive limitation.. it uses LBA48I did not realize that the proccessor had anything to do with harddrive limitation. not the prcesser..but hte Chipset.. all chipset for the amdk7 are based around the AMD proof of consecept as it was the first X86 chip to not use the same slot as a intel X86 chip.. In the AMD specs they have a 2TB limit on drives for their chipset.. (even though no one has a 2TB disk) its their for addressing so the socket could expand for more options. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted March 24, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2005 cool, thanks for clearing that up. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted April 2, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 After about 5 days of working out bugs, I have a stable system(media player connected to my tv)). It is configured so my wife only has to press the power button once to start it, and once again to shutdown. it has a simple interface to use, which is controlled by a wireless keyboard.http://freevo.sourceforge.net/ss/blurr/freevo_ss1_640.jpgWe just use it for music, movies, and tv shows that have been downloaded, to watch at our convience. Oh ya and PORN (just kidding my wife is not a big porn fan)some of the specsathlon 750 mhz 512kb cahcematrox g450 (video card)200 gb IDE harddrive128 mb ram19" beadroom tvit is averaging about 30% cpu load and using about 100 mb of ram. In therory this would work on an 300 mhz athlon(if there is such a thing) Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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