cf-27 hard drive.

what is the max hdd size capacity of a cf-27?

 

Not sure! But my CF27FC handles a 60GB quite well

 

i think the one im getting is a mark 2. its in the mail so im not sure.

a 40 would work considering its mainly a garage unit lol.

and i assume the pcmcia slot is the only way to get wireless lan connectivity on these?

 

It had a 10gb in it. Looking around it seems that at some time in that vintage PII there was a general switch from 8.x max HDD to 32gb capacity. Since we know it will run a 10gb it seems likely that it will handle at least 30gb. I suspect there are at least a few guys on the forum who have some 30gb pulls laying around.

 

60 is the max you want to use. It can see (kind of) and use larger but starts locking up randomly.

 

ok thanks zero.

 

Hi,

This is an old threat, but I think it can use a little updating. I've got a Panasonic CF-27Mk2 (P300/128MB) with bios version V2.10L13B (CF-27EJ) and it uses a new Samsung HM160HC 160GB IDE Hard drive without any problem. The max the Panasonic will see is 137Gb.

The bios sees it as a 65535MB disk, while windows sees it as a 137Gb disk. I've made a C: drive of 30Gb and a D: of 100Gb which works very well. I'm using this setup (to play divx's) for two months now without any problems.

I have tried to play with enabling LBA48 in the windows registry to get the full 160GB, but found out that this will not work. It made the disk useless when I tried to fill the disk above the 137Gb limit. I had to get a new disk, so be careful! Even a low-level format doesn't make the disk usable again!

I also tested this in a Panasonic CF-71Mk2 with the same positive results.

Regards,

Michiel

 

That’s good info

The Toughbooks that I have installed the 160gb drive in show the full capacity in windows of a total of 149gb for the two partitions that I use

Wow you must have a extensive mp3 collection to get it over 137gb

I would never ever load up the hard drive to more than 75% capacity, which in this case is 111gb though as you will have issues defragging the drive properly

In the really old Toughbooks such as the cf-25 I used to install a dynamic drive overlay to allow the bios to run larger drives

If your toughbook is up and running with windows you can download HD Tune
And In the info section it will report if you m/b chipset has 48bit support for large drives

Lesson to learn from your testing is to use 120gb and smaller drives in these early Toughbooks that do not support 48 bit addressing

Alex

 

Yes, the best way is to use 120gb or smaller drives for this old laptop. I found out that the use of 137gb can give some problems due to an old restriction in the Phoenix bios, as it will only address 128gb properly.

My conclusion is that the max HDD size you can safely utilize in a CF-27Mk2 will be 128gb. I've tested this extensively with W2K and Windows FLP.

b.t.w. this MK2 baby does not only play mp3's. It does play DIVX movies quit well, as long as the decoding profile does not exceed the "home theater" profile. Only thing it can't handle without skipping is streaming high quality audio to a bluetooth headset (via an AKA BT&USB2 cardbus using Bluesoliel) and playing movies... )

 

One word of caution:

Don't ever make the C: partition bigger than the BIOS can see, unless you use a boot-time dynamic overlay.

Until Windows loads and switches to it's own drivers, it relies on BIOS access. If the partition is bigger than the BIOS sees, files needed for boot can get relocated (or replaced by updates) beyond the BIOS accessible area while Windows is running. If this happens, the next boot will fail.

You can use the rest of the drive as a D: partition, up to whatever limit Windows can see.