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Date:	Fri, 22 Feb 2002 12:27:52 PST7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Any limitation on hard drive size ?

Content Type: text/plain

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Steven Levine wrote:
>
> >I was kinda hoping I could find out any "gotchas"
> >_before_ I bought the drives . . .
>
> Then you might consider listening to what others
> have to say and deciding if they are applicable
> to your specific hardware/software setup.

Steven,

I tried to understand what you were saying, but I never did figure out
what your concern was. Sometimes I probably push too hard for an
answer.

Last September, Sheridan privately forwarded the following to me and I
just found it while looking for info on this topic. It's from Daniela
Engert and was originally on the os2-hardware mail list:

> On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 01:31:08 -0400, Jim Hanley wrote:
>
>> I was trying to get an old 430VX chipset board to
>> recognize this 14G drive
>
> Hi Jim!
>
> If this is one of the BIOSes which fail at a certain
> disk size limit (like the Award 4.51 BIOS in the
> machine I am sitting at now which freezes (!) with
> disks larger than 32GB), then later builds of
> DaniS506.ADD will come to rescue:
>
> 1) You need an OS/2 boot floppy with DaniS506.ADD
> (preferably v1.3.9b) and the latest build of the
> DiskInfo utility.
>
> 2) Remove the new disk from the BIOS (it *must* not
> be recognized at boot time!)
>
> 3) Boot from the floppy
>
> 4) Run "DiskInfo 0m m " (in your
> case, will probably be 8G)
>
> 5) Reboot, and add this disk to the BIOS again. It
> should report a size of 8GB now, thus making the
> BIOS happy.
>
> 6) When booting to OS/2, DaniS506.ADD will make the
> fully disk capacity available again regardless the
> BIOS information.
>
> Ciao,
> Dani

The DiskInfo program comes in Dani's DaniS506 package. The
documentation is sparse (search DaniS506.DOC for "diskinfo"). The
source code is also in the package but I'm not a C programmer so I
didn't follow all the calls -- the 'm' option appears to cause several
IOCTL calls but I don't know if these are merely reading register
information from the drive or actually changing some of the register
values.

Dani's procedure above appears to be telling the large drive to "report"
a smaller drive size to the motherboard BIOS. Her procedure also
doesn't say why a boot floppy should be used, although it's obvious this
would be necessary if the large drive was also the boot drive since
during the procedure the drive isn't seen by the motherboard BIOS and
hence can't be booted to. In cases where the large drive is not the
boot drive then perhaps you wouldn't need a boot floppy.

If the drive is permanently set to report a different size by this
method then booting into other operating systems may cause the drive to
be seen as smaller than it really is, since those other operating
systems won't be using Dani's driver.

- Peter

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