| Author |
Message |
Craig
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2000 - 1:53 am: | |
I am trying to get an old Dell OptiPlex XL 575/590 ( P75/90) to recognise a 1G Hdd. It works fine with 330 Mb and 420 Mb Hdds I have.
I believe the 1G Hdd I have is ok as I have loaded it with Win 98 and Office 97 on another machine and the other machine boots it up no problems.
I have adjusted setup settings on the Dell manuallly setting the cylinders, heads etc and tried the auto settings with no luck. Reading on this site/links etc I believe I have to update the bios. I have downloaded an updated bios from dell.com but I don't know how to install it (i.e. I don't know the jumper settings to disable the board to flash the bios. Any help greatly appreciated. |
Danny Albers (Danny)
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2000 - 7:47 am: | |
What brand is the hard drive?
Go to their website and download the drive overlay software. It has different names, but essentially what you should be able to download is a program that creates a bootdisk that will format, and install the drive on your machine, regardless of age.
Fujitso has Disk-Go for example. But almost every manufacturer has some kind of software on their website, with detailed instructions on how to run it.
It will reformat the drive, but then the drive will work in your dated PC.
These programs have been in use for years, and are very reliable, but increase your vulnerability to boot sector viruses. So make sure you have an antivirus running and up to date. |
Adam Emswiler (Abe)
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2000 - 8:39 am: | |
You may also want to go to Dell's website and update the BIOS for the motherboard. Certain BIOS revisions didn't support drives larger than 800 MB, but at times, the newer BIOS updates help that problem. |
Craig
| | Posted on Friday, July 21, 2000 - 12:03 am: | |
Thanks alot!!! Problem solved, updated the bios, still no luck with recognising the 1G IBM Hdd, went to the IBM site, they too have a 'disk go' program. Mucked around with it and bingo it's up and running. Again, many thanks for the spot on tips, regards Craig. |
mike thebluesguy
| | Posted on Thursday, July 27, 2000 - 12:13 am: | |
Craig...one thing to check. your bios may be addressing the drive with the aid of the overlay but is it seeing the drive's full capacity? check with chkdsk or by right clicking the drive letter and then clicking properties within windows 95/98. also check properties with drivespace, if it's installed in your OS. if your autodetect is showing 1024,16,63, that's okay. some will show 2048,16,63. accept the setting then boot from the disk containing the overlay. ontrack's disk manager works well and it exists in various versions at the individual drive manufacturers' websites. western digital has EZ drive, seagate disk wizard and so on. try to find one specific for your drive and use the help files to give you the specifics. they also have some drive utilities, one which will check to see whether or not the drive is being controlled properly. stay with it, mike |
|
