Upgrading ATA33 HDD?

Tagstar · January 17th, 2003, 11:59 AM

I need to upgrade the storage capacity on a fairly old comp. It already has a Fujitsu MPC2064AT-M2, Id:JW AFIB, Part No.CA01675-B83400M2, Serial No. 0500 9294 1998-12. Apparently 2GB in size, tho' any reference I can find for it online quotes it at around 6GB !! Anyhow,I can appreciate that getting a HD that runs with ATA33 is not going to be easy,but I have read that ATA66 HDD will work but only at the ATA33 rate which is fine for me,but are the IDE cables different? The motherboard supports PIO modes 0-4. Am running Win98 on the present drive,and there is a space and connectors ready for another HD to go in . All toughts on this greatly appreciated

?Any other info needed?

osprey4 · January 17th, 2003, 12:03 PM

Consider purchasing a controller card. This will allow your system to support a bigger drive and run it at its rated speed. Even big drives are cheap so it's hardly worth buying anything small.

Congrats for keeping that old machine going strong!

AzKidd69 · January 17th, 2003, 12:05 PM

well if everything you have found about that drive say it's a 6 gig and your mobo is only reporting/letting you use approx 2 gigs.. tell us the make/model of the mobo and the bios version.. it's possible it's a bios restriction that is not letting you see/use the full capacity of the HDD you already have

as far as the cables.. the cables for ata 33 and 66 are identical and te cables for ata 100/133 are identical and fully interchangeable ( with a possible spped hit i.e. using an ata66 cable with a ata133 drive/controller will only run @ ata66)

oh yea and afaik you still should be able to use even an ata133 hdd with that old box ( i beleive ata133 is still backwards compatible to ata33 )

Tagstar · January 17th, 2003, 12:17 PM

Mobo is Fujitsu -Siemens D1064 with Phoenix BIOS Version 4.06 Rev 1.04.1064

**EvilRick** · January 17th, 2003, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by AzKidd69

as far as the cables.. the cables for ata 33 and 66 are identical and te cables for ata 100/133 are identical and fully interchangeable ( with a possible spped hit i.e. using an ata66 cable with a ata133 drive/controller will only run @ ata66)

Actually ATA33 is 40 pin (40 wire)

ATA66/100/133 are 40 pin (80 wire)

And is it the BIOS that's showing only 2GB, or do you have a drive that's formatted with a FAT16 partition of only 2GB. You may have a 6GB drive and it only has a 2GB partition.

Do an 'FDISK' from a DOS prompt to show you what disk space is being used. Just don't delete/change any partitions.

Tagstar · January 17th, 2003, 01:58 PM

Ha Haaaa, you got it ! In the bios setup the capacity CHS/LBA =6486 MBytes !! Using fdisk it showed C: 2045 FAT32 33%used .actual size 6187 MBytes.

Am I going to have to reformat the HD to free up the partition? And in the BIOS the LBA Translation Mode is set to PTL ,and (as far as I know) it should be set to LBA to enable the recognition of HDs bigger than 2GB,is that right ??

**EvilRick** · January 17th, 2003, 02:01 PM

Your BIOS may not recognize it w/ LBA, but you could try. Set it to 'AUTO' if you can, I would say use whatever it does.

As for the reformatting, no, you don't have to. There are apps you can use to expand the disk size.

Like Partition Magic

Tagstar · January 17th, 2003, 02:08 PM

Yeah, I changed the BIOS setting to LBA and it didn't recognise it,so rebooted and changed it back.Now off to Partition Magic

**EvilRick** · January 17th, 2003, 02:13 PM

Just some follow up instructions.

You'll have to convert the drive to FAT32 in order to break the 2GB barrier.

With PM, you change the partition to FAT32, then expand it to fill the rest of the drive.

What OS is residing on that 2GB partition anyway? If it's prior to 95b, I don't think you can expand to FAT32. You might have to just add an extended partition and logical drive using 'FDISK' on a bootable floppy. Will save you getting PM.

Tagstar · January 19th, 2003, 02:29 PM

It's running 98SE,and it's already formatted in FAT32