BIOS limitations

[PeteSchiffer]

Hi,

I've been puzzled by this for a while.

Regarding the size of hard drives recognised in the BIOS. I know that there size limitations in older BIOSes, and that the older the BIOS the smaller the size that will be recognisable. And that the possible answer is to flash the BIOS to upgrade it to accept a larger drive. I understand too that drives may come with some sort of 'overlay' program which works around the limitation. This seems to me like some sort of temporary solution. Are 'flashing the BIOS' and the overlay two different solutions to the same problem?

I understand that often there is a discrepancy in the sizes reported due to different interpretations of what a GB is.

But what puzzles me is what happens where.

Say you have a 20GB drive but the BIOS will only see 8GB. What's to be done here? BIOS upgrade?

Say, with the same drive, the BIOS will recognise the full size, but the partitions are limited to a small size. Is this a BIOS problem or an OS problem?

What does the overlay program do? And does this affect the use of something like fdisk? I take it the each drive manufacturer has its own version of the same thing.

Thanks,

I really appreciate all the effort folk put in to answer the questions I and other people post here.

Pete

[YODA74]

I can tell you what the drive overlay program does: it compensates for the fact that your BIOS can't comprehend the drive geometry for newer, larger hard drives. Generally speaking, the overlay works at a lower level than the OS does, so there's shouldn't be too many worries making it work with a fresh install.But I beleive you would only use an overlay if you had a real old or a small HDD not sure about that.

------------------
Death has come to our windows.

-- Jeremiah 9:21
(undoubtedly a Biblical reference to a Microsoft product!)

YODA74@carolina.rr.com