16-head hard drive: will setting my BIOS beyond 16 heads screw it up?

[orange400]

So here's the scoop ... I finally got a new hard drive for my 486 laptop! It's a 814MB Toshiba. This thing rocks. Buuuuut ... my lapper won't recognize all of its cylinders. So that's ok, I'll just lower my cylinders in the BIOS until it can read it. So I got to 1025 cylinders with a readout of 504MB. Kinda cutting down the size, but hey, coming from a slow 120MB, this thing is gonna go quick with a smaller seek area and will have a helluva lot more space.

But here's the real deal: I can set my head size beyond the 16 heads that exist on my laptop's HDD. I can up the sectors too, but I haven't tried it. fdisk.exe reads the hard drive as 778MB with the head setting set to 25, but I'm not sure if this setting will work out. Will it?

Welcome to 1995! :D

[orange400]

Okay, nevermind, it really screws it up ... lol ...

... fdisk can't even finish the drive's integrity check ... hahahaha ...

Maybe one of those programs like EZ-Drive would do it ...

[Th0r]

Originally posted by orange400
Okay, nevermind, it really screws it up ... lol ...

... fdisk can't even finish the drive's integrity check ... hahahaha ...

Maybe one of those programs like EZ-Drive would do it ...


Possible yes, try it :)

[orange400]

Holy crap, look at what I found on an EZ-Drive site!!

Until about 1995-1996, most PCs were limited to hard drives smaller than 504MB due to limitations in the system ROM BIOS ...

504 is how much I maxxed out at!

[orange400]

Neat! I got a hold of an overlay utility and I'm installing it right now! Hopefully it'll work out ... but it's formatting parts of the drive the BIOS couldn't touch so it all looks like its going great.

[orange400]

It works!!

811,487,232 bytes free! Feel the power!

Sweet ... Ok I'm done posting about this one ;)

[Th0r]

LoL..good my laddy :D

[volvo9]

I've got my 486 laptop running right next to me right now! I've got a 6gb hard drive in it and i do not need to use any utility software like EZ BIOS to get to work, although I have used it plenty of times on other computers in the past.

It's my school computer as I can just throw it in my backpack and not really care a whole lot about it, as I would a new $1500 laptop, plus the battery lasts over 4 hours!, that's without using any power saving features.