CF-28 BIOS limits on Hard Drive (GRAVITAR??)

I have a MK2? CF-28PBJA9QM and I was trying to put in a larger hard drive (from the 30gb to a 160gb) but the BIOS appears to be so old that it won't recognize over 137gb.

I thought I saw a post on here where someone (I think it was Gravitar) put a 160gb in his CF-28 and I'm wondering how a person would go about doing this with this BIOS limitation. Do you have to use a "dynamic drive overlay" or ?????

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Harry

 

I don,nt know about the limnts of the bios on that but he most likely used what call dyanmic disk over lay

you can google for more info

 

It's like I said in your other thread.

160GB hard drive will format into somewhere around what you have. (Math in my head says 135-138GB).

If you want a 160GB drive, don't format it or use it. It will stay as a 160 (Advertised spec, not actual) on your desk

 

There is a hard disk drive limit in certain OS. Windows 2000 has a limit of 137 before SP3 and Windows XP has the limit also. You might need to change a registry setting so it will be recognized. I have a CF-28 MK 1 and I have a 160GB drive it in. I updated the regisitry before I transferred the file to a bigger hard drive. That might help.

 

i have a cf-48 p4 1.8ghz with a hitachi 5400 rpm 160gb drive. windows xp pro sp2 finds it to be 149gb on fresh load

 

I think Modly's right on this one.. Its a truth in advertising issue. Historically, we've considered a Kilobyte to be 1024 bytes, A megabyte to be 1024 kilobytes, etc. Well, the HD manufacturers decided they would call 1000 Megabytes a "GB". (I don't think you'll ever catch them advertising it as a "gigabyte", just a GB) So when the computer divides it into groups of 1024, you end up with a lower total than what the drive's sticker says.

 

OK, it appears to have been working all along. It looks like the BIOS in the TB will only see 137gb due to the limitation on the older BIOSes but that doesn't seem to be important as the OS (WINXP) doesn't really care what the BIOS sees.

After booting into XP and looking at the drive in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management, I see the drive is shown as being 149gb, so I lost 11gb in the "conversion" process but I have more than the 137gb that BIOS thinks it has.

My problem was in seeing that the TB BIOS only saw the drive as 137gb but since it doesn't seem to affect anything I'm a happy camper and moving on ! ! If I put a 400gb drive in there it would still only show up as 137bg in BIOS. The newer ToughBooks probably have the BIOS updated to show larger drives correctly.

thanks for all the input.

Harry

 

Does anyone know if a fix is available for this limit? I ran into this issue while setting up my CF-28 with Linux.

cheers, Paul

 

paule,
I believe if you read Modly's post at the beginning of this thread and hpa's post just above you will have your answer. Just out of curiosity, what do you plan on putting on a CF-28 that won't fit in 140gb? My CF-30 which has a complete install of XP PRO SP2, all the usual stuff, Office, Acrobat(not reader), Photoshop, and 4 different navigation programs with full sets of charts or maps in small detail of all of North America for each, plus Kaspersky IS and on and on. I also have complete plans and specs for 3 large bridge replacement jobs, and all the AutoCad software to deal with those and I have used only 38gb on my hard drive. The CF-28 is really not designed for movie viewing nor does it offer much in the way of sound quality for music. So, not being mean or trying to put anyone down, I'm really curious, what could you want on a CF-28 that would overload 140gb?
CAP

 

Paul

I've got a CF-28P (800MHz) with a 250GB disk running XP and Ubuntu 8.10 in a multi boot configuration. The only thing you need to be sure of is that the /boot partition is entirely within the first ~130GB of the disk, as that is all that is addressable via the BIOS. (once the kernel loads, it can access the entire drive) my partitions are as follows (in on-disk order)

1. Linux /boot, 500MB primary
2. XP c: , 160GB primary
3. Linux root, 75GB extended
4. Linux swap, 350MB extended

nine

 

Hi CAP,

Thanks for the reply. I was just wondering if there was a bios fix for the limit. I had replaced the drive that came with my CF-28 when it died, and had run into an issue as I was trying to format the partitions for my linux system. When I bought the 160g drive I didn't realize that it would be too large. I have since repartitioned the drive, and have about 12 gig of unused space. No urgency, I was just looking to see if there was a way I could use the whole disk.

Thanks very much for the time and attention.

cheers, Paul

 

Hi Nine,

Thanks for the reply. I have done something along those lines. I am using Puppy Linux, and had initially set up the disk so that all of the disk except for the last couple of gig's was that primary partition, and wanted to use the last 2 for the swap. Using gparted I could allocate the space, but could not format the swap partition. Now that I have reduced the primary to 130 g, with the swap following immediately behind, everything is working fine. I just have a 12 gig partition that I am wondering what if anything to do with.

Thanks again for the time and attention.

cheers, Paul

 

So, if you get a 120 gb drive, you don't have any worries.