A guy that works in a machine shop next to where I work asked me if I could upgrade his Pentium II with a larger HD. Since he had already fried his old drive and gone out and bought a new 500GB drive, I told him I would try and see if would work. I was not sure if the Pentium II would support such a large drive. Well after several hours of trying to get the drive to format only to give me a reduced capacity and a "A no disk read error" The manual that came with the HD stated that the system must support 48-bit bios and I am not sure if the Pentium II does.

That old a machine will probably not have 48 bit support but you have two possibilities. If the new drive came with a software disk us it for doing all the formatting and setup. No only should it be able to format the entire drive, read and follow all the instructions for that, it may be able to install "overlay software" onto the start of the drive which basically overcomes the BIOS limitations.

The other possibiilty is to install the operating system on the reduced portion of the drive, then use it to format the remainder of the drive. If you remove the reduction jumper it may be able to do that, but there is no guarantee that this will work.

Its not the Pentium II that's the problem, its the motherboard. A lot of boards of this era don't support drives bigger than 32Gb regardless of how its been partitioned. Overlay or the "cap drive limit to 32Gb" jumper would be the only options available to you but if neither work, then that drive isn't going to be usable on that computer I'm afraid.

Tyger & Neil

Thanks for your response. I have already given him the news that this "Upgrade" is just not feasible. He explained to me that he needs this size drive in order to run the programs for his newly acquired CNC mills. I in return responded that it's not the drive alone he is need of for this type of equipment but an entire system upgrade since he will be running three Mills. I informed him that although his system still works if he wants to be more productive in the future, he needs a system to handle that requirement and that in relation to what he paid for the drive a couple hundred more invested would provide him that security.

Sometimes getting somebody to understand that is a bit difficult, but after about an hour and a couple of beers later I think he understands. LOL

Once again thanks for your input on this issue