DOS Games Discussion

I have a new problem,
I want to replace the two 1 GB HDDs in my dedicated DOS/Win3.11 computer with something larger as they are actually almost full now.

Short version:

Does old motherboards not support "new" HDDs, e.g. around 100 GB? By old I mean the Asus P/I-XP55T2P4 (Pentium 1 based, circa 1996).

Manual: http://www.google.no/url?sa=t&source=we ... aq4WEZhD1A

Longer version:

I tried first with a 80 GB HDD and found that no matter what IDE channel I attached the device to, and no matter where on the cable and no matter what jumper settings I used on the drive (yes, I actually tried all combinations prior to giving up) I was unable to make the BIOS detect the drive.
I tried a different cable, even though it would be strange if it worked with a different cable -- as the old 1 GB HDD still worked fine.
I tried then a different drive, even though I knew it worked, a 120 GB HDD, this one too failed in the same way as the 80 GB did.
I then tried a really old 280 MB HDD, this one worked fine.

Is there some reason a motherboard such as the one I'm using (the Asus P/I-XP55T2P4) would not even detect a "new" HDD? Is there anything I can do about it, and what is the maximum size I can use?

I looked through the manual to no avail, I couldn't find anything on maximum size of the HDD.

Thanks in advance!

I just tried a 13 GB and a 30 GB HDD, they both worked fine, so apparently the limit must be somewhere >= 30 and <= 80.

This is obviously not the first time I have run into a size barrier, but I think it is the first time I have seen a HDD not be detected at all due to this issue.

32GB is the limit for the FAT filesystem..

FAT32 can address a fair bit more but you can't copy files larger than 4GB to them.

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_driv ... rriers.htm

[Edit]
Also, cluster size, bigger isn't always better.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partCluster-c.html
If you have a big sized FAT16 partition with 32 KB cluster size it means that a 1KB file will eat up 32KB disk space.....
And as some games have a lot of small files .... (Falcon3 to name only one).

I know about these size barriers, but wouldn't they all merely affect the HDD such that the OS can only see up to [insert arbitrary size barrier here]?

In my case I'm not limited to 32 GB on my 80 GB HDD, the BIOS doesn't detect the HDD at all, how can a size barrier do that?

*sigh*

points to: GOOGLE.

Or join a tech forum, this is after all a dosgaming forum, I'm not in the mood to go over all that same boring tech stuff once again, sorry, nope.

You seem to be the kind of : "you answer one question and I will ask ten others based on what you answered.

We are NOT here on DGF to do your donkey work, do it yourself and learn from it.

And now I gonna close this topic because it's boring.
Moi don't like boring topics, and as I see you found your way to Vogons, you may harass them.

>locked<

Good call dossy!!