An antique laptop - help appriciated .

First things first - hello all!
I'm the proud owner of antique laptop,make about 1997-99 maybe.
It's an AST Ascentia M series lappy,with 233 mhz mmx cpu,4 gbt harddrive,cd-rom,and now a 128 mbt of ram.
Well,it does preform well,for a 10 old lappy,BUT the maker is gone long ago,and i can't make it to recognize harddrive more then 8 gbt's,and even can't enter the data manualy in lappy's BIOS about hd's.
So,what,if anything can be done ?

 

Strange, I thought the Pentium motherboards could recognize HDDs up to 80Gb.

 

Not 10 years ago..

To be honest, i dont think anything can be done if its even possible. Its probably a limitation on the hardware that cant address anymore than 8gb.

 

I had a P1 desktop in 1999 which had a 10.2Gb HDD in it, and it worked without a problem.

 

What OS muadim?

There might be a LBA update.

 

maudim, it is possible to get the machine to use all of the 80gb, but you will have to make 10 8gb partitions on the drive.
AST was the best 10yrs ago, that is why your laptop still runs. I have a few old AST workstations, and they are still running for over 15 yrs.

I did a similar upgrade in an old packard bell I had, and I made a few 7.5gb partitions on the drive. The limit is the old ata 16 or ata 33 hub, so there is nothing you can do to force the capacity over 8gb per partition.

Good luck, I would love to see some pics

K-TRON

 

o.thanks,fellas !
What bugs me is this - can i force it to recognize a cf card conected as hdd drive ?
It sure'll make my lappy colder (nevermind i got the cooling stand).
But it's a 16 gbt's cf card,conected to a covertor .

 

not sure, old systems are picky, and I dont think it will recognize it since compact flash was invented long afterwards. You can try, but it working or not is something only testing can answer.

K-TRON

 

I wonder - if i'll get a working cdrom,attach a big 20 gbt hdd,will i able use the software for bypassing a 8 gbt limit .......

 

have you tried any of those tools
I think maxtor made ezdisk or something but there were tools, that allowed bigger drives to run on old bios' without flashing.

my memory is fuzzy but I definitely got a 40gb running on a mobo with a 10gb hdd limit

 

nope,no a help at all,and ontrack is hanging the pc

 

I bought an AST Ascentia 950N 12 years ago and successfully upgraded the HDD all the way from 1.4GB to 2GB, (which was probably close to the maximum available at that time) but was supported in the BIOS since they did a version with the bigger HDD. I've still got the 1.4GB HDD as an ornament. I suspect that computer is from an era when the BIOS needed to be coded with the HDD options and the user couldn't fill in the table for cylinders, heads and sectors.

BTW, I see from my records that a 16MB RAM upgrade cost £399 in 1996.

John

 

I had a dell inspiron with a pentium 3 about a year ago. I upgraded the hardrive from 6gb to 20gb. I installed XP on the 20gb HDD. The installation went fine but the laptop refuse to boot into windows.
The solution that worked for me was to reformat the harddive as FAT32 instead of NTFS.
It way work for you too.

 

You keep records of RAM upgrades from 12 years ago! You sir are a very dedicated computer user.

I find it fun to look back at the old tech sometimes. Its amazing how far we've really come. We talk in gigahertz and terabytes now where even 10 years ago that was unheard of scifi talk.

I cant wait to look back in 10 years and laugh that CPU's only had 4 cores and ran in gH, and people somehow got by with less than an exabyte of memory

 

Financial records in Quicken. Unfortunately, some expenditures are lumped together - easy at the time but not so useful for the future.

It pre-dates Quicken, but I recall that a 256 kB RAM disk for the Epson PX8 cost about £250 in 1984. That could store a word-processing program then.

John

 

For your laptop id probaly say a new cpu would be needed and more ram but i dont think itd be worth it and even the best cpu you could get would still be slow lol.

 

Besides the dell inspiron I had also a Twinhead VX laptop. The spec was 128MB RAM, Pentium II 233 Mhz and 6gb harddrive.
I installed an nLite version of Windows XP I've created. Result booting time around 40 seconds which is faster than the booting time of Vista Home Premium in my friend's Pentium Core2Duo E2180 and his 250bg hardrive and his 2gb ram.
If you want to give a go to nLite and create your own version of Windows XP follow this tutorial:

HTML:

http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php

There is also a special version of Windows XP designed by Microsoft for legacy computers. It was sold only to corporation that couldn't afford to upgrade their hardware. The exact name for this version of Windows is " Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs" or WinFLP for short. You can read about it here:

HTML:

http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-windows-xp-fundamentals-for-legacy-pcs-screenshots.aspx

the minimum installation of WinFLP is about 600MB and the full one is about 1150MB. During the installation you can control the different options to install, and hence the size of the installation.
In my case nLite worked out to be better. One of my nLite XP installation came at less than 400MB.

P.S. Note that the size of the paging file is not included.

 

Well,i knew about the Windows Fundamentals,but my copy was somehow f*ked up,and couldn't install.
Update - got myself a working copy of WinFLP - myohmy,that takes ages to install........

 

well......Made one successful install of WinFLP,and couldn't repeat it.....

 

try nLite with a normal version of XP.
By the way did to fix the issue you ad with the HDD upgrade?

 

nope,i didn't.
Scraped myself a Thinkpad 50e at ridicules price ,only need to get it of our factory repairman.....