HowToFixComputers.com

Patty · Guest

Hey Jef,

I finally got it together and it works beautifully so far. It powered up,
booted to a floppy. BIOS recognizes the CPU and RAM. I need to get a hard
drive, I see that Circuit City has a Seagate 160GB for $30 after mail-in
rebate, I may not be able to pass that up. Thank you so much for the CPU
and RAM. You are the best!

Patty

Bird Janitor® · Guest

Patty wrote:
|
| Hey Jef,
|
| I finally got it together and it works beautifully so far. It powered
| up, booted to a floppy. BIOS recognizes the CPU and RAM. I
| need to get a hard drive, I see that Circuit City has a Seagate
| 160GB for $30 after mail-in rebate, I may not be able to pass
| that up. Thank you so much for the CPU and RAM. You are the
| best!
|
| Patty

Hi Patty -

Coolness! Happy to pass along the bits I had no need for. I was holding
onto them for no particular reason and was glad they found a good home.

And you can't beat that price for a hard disk, even if you do have to wait
for the rebate.

Jef

Patty · Guest

On Sun, 27 May 2007 20:23:33 GMT, Bird Janitor® wrote:

Bird Janitor® · Guest

Patty wrote:
|
| Turns out I had a 160GB hard drive. My daughter had tried to use
| it in an old computer (she got the hard drive from work, she works
| in an IT department) and it got errors and would not work correctly.
| I thought it was bad, but wondered about the fact of using it in a
| computer that needed an overlay just to use an 80GB hard drive.
| So, I hung onto it. Installed it in this computer and it appears to
| work perfectly. So, now I figure, the error problems with it had to
| do with the BIOS not recognizing it correctly and, even with the
| overly, there were still some problems between it and the BIOS of
| the old (very old) computer. So, I will see how this one works. So
| good so far. Just need another stick of RAM, I have a 512MB
| stick on order that I hope will play nice with the 256 that you sent.
| Then I'll be all set!
|
| Thanks again!
|
| Patty

Hi Patty -

More coolness!

Good thing your daughter gave you the 160GB drive from a computer whose BIOS
probably didn't even break the 32GB barrier due to the BIOS bug present in
the late 1990's. If I remember correctly, 24-bit LBA got us to 8.4GB and
28-bit LBA was supposed to make us gold all the way to 128GB .. but the bug,
largely in Award BIOS' of the 1998-1999 vintage effectively limited the
motherboard to 32GB.

But it's to your benefit they tossed the drive as defective rather than
tossing the computer as obsolete.

Hopefully your additional stick of RAM will be compatible with the one I
sent you. You might have to limit the timings, so don't toss the baby with
the bathwater until you've gone through the Memtest paces.

Jef

Patty · Guest

On Wed, 30 May 2007 02:05:57 GMT, Bird Janitor® wrote: