can anyone help me with what the bios limitation is on my older pc & what models internal hd i could put in the tower that woul.d run my pc w/ a little more space? how do i check the bios limitations?
They might be able to use some more information about your bios.
One way to get some, is to use a free utility program named Everest.
You can download it here:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.htmlYou can have it produce a nice plain text file, with all sorts of info about your computer. Save it. Text search it, looking for bios
and you'll find the bios manufacturer name, and the date of the bios, at least.
i don't have $ to buy a new pc at this time
I know that feeling!
& need more space as i currently only have about 1 gb free space on the c drive. my current internal hd says it is a seagate model ST38410A w/ 8455 MB. the pc is a MS windows XP SP2 256 MB Ram. thanks, dede
Although this doesn't prove anything, it might give you some hope and perspective:
This computer I'm using right now operates under Win98SE.
AMD K-6. That is equivalent to Pentium. Not II or III, just Pentium
The date on the bios is 1999. I just checked the report I made with Everest. (The bios is AMI)
What I'm saying is that I suspect mine is much older than yours.
Recently, I too needed to jockey some things around. Had an 8G drive. Bought a used Western Digital 40G drive. I wondered if my system would see perhaps only 32G of it.
It didn't.... it sees it all.
However, the Auto detect function of the bios does not like the new drive - it just locks up.
I simply entered the drive parameters manually, and it works fine.
I'm hoping somebody else, with lots more experience than I, will jump in here and comment about setting drive parameters manually.
There are limits, etc.
Fumbling through notes here, I believe my settings were:
Cylinders = 16368 Heads = 16 Sectors = 63
and that is the same as the 8G drive! Again, it will take somebody else here to explain how that can be.
If you try to go with a very large - by comparison - drive.... over 137G, then I would not be surprised if you hit the wall and could not 'see' all your drive.
I have nothing more than a gut feeling, but I'm thinking you too can probably use at least a 40G drive.