> I KNOW somebody here has had this happen before. Maybe someone (Issachar?) might have some insights. Here goes.
> I recently bought a 10G hard drive for my desktop system at home. I already had a 1.6G as the master and a 3.2G as the slave. I replaced the 1.6 with the 10.
> While in FDISK, I noted that the new drive's size was reported as 8.4G. Not a great surprise. The machine is 3 years old. Has a Slot5 motherboard which, even with the latest BIOS flash, can't see anything beyond 8.4G.
> I'm going to upgrade the mommieboard, memory, and processor later. Iss, I kept a copy of your post to the "Is it Christmas yet?" (Heresy! I put the question mark inside the quotes!) thread regarding your 233MHz setup.
> The weirdness is: the ONLY floppies that I can boot with are the original "system disk" that came with the machine and its copy. None of the DOS boot floppies, which used to work, or the Win95 startup disks, which also used to work are bootable.
> The machine goes through its hardware checks, spins the floppy, then just sits there.
> Bizarro.

Well, my understanding of the issues you've described is pretty much entirely academic, since I've never actually had to deal with the 8.4GB hard disk addressable limit in an older BIOS. I guess it isn't too surprising that a Socket 5 motherboard wouldn't have any BIOS updates recent enough to support the Int13h extensions necessary for the BIOS to correctly address drives greater than 8.4GB. Since there's no BIOS update you can get, the only other options I've heard of are BIOS cards that can be installed in an expansion slot (haven't actually seen any of these, though, and I don't know where you can get them), or a set of software translation drivers.

On the topic of those translation drivers, as I was just reviewing one of my favorite sites (the PC Guide) to see if it could shed some light on the subject, I found that there can be floppy disk boot issues related to the software translation drivers. I'll quote the relevant paragraph:

"Because the driver is located on the hard disk, you must boot from the hard disk to load it. If you boot from a floppy, normally your hard disk will seem to 'disappear'. The driver does allow you to boot from a floppy, but you must do it by booting the hard disk, waiting for the message that says 'To boot from a floppy disk, press the space bar' and then put the floppy into the drive."

Apparently, these software drivers frequently come packaged with the retail hard drive. Do you suppose that as part of the driver installation for your new hard drive, a software translation driver of this type was loaded onto your drive? That could explain the weirdness with the floppy boot disks not working correctly, I suppose, although I'm not sure why the original boot disks would still work. It seems in any case as though if there are special drivers installed in your system, they aren't working as they should, to get around that 8.4GB BIOS limitation. So this is all sheer speculation.

It's good that you're planning to upgrade to a new motherboard in the relatively near future, at any rate. That's definitely the best way to solve the problem. If you wanted to read the section of The PC Guide that deals with BIOS issues and hard drive sizes, there's a link to that page below.

Iss "just as clueless as the next guy" achar