> From: Paul Crable <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I currently operate a Packard Bell 486DX-25. It has a 126 Mbyte HDD.
> I'd like to replace it or augment it with a second drive. The BIOS
> appears to support a variety of drives, the largest of which is 300
> Mbytes. Unfortunately, I cannot find any drives on the market with a
> capacity that low.
There are a couple of decent solutions; one hardware and one software.
Software-wise, some of the others have already mentioned. There are programs
like Disk Manager, EZ-Drive, MaxBlast and others, usually provided with the
HD, that enable you to set up an EIDE hard drive on older machines.
The hardware route (my preference) is an add-on board (my favorite is the GSI
Model 1C) that adds BIOS support for the larger drives, and autodetects the
parameters on bootup. We upgraded a PILE of older PCs at work to accept
larger drives using the GSI 1C. That plus a bigger hard drive, an upgrade
chip (Kingston Turbochip) and a RAM upgrade, and we took a bunch of low-end
486's to the low-end Pentium range, enabling them to run Windows 95 and
Office 95 acceptably and giving them 2-3 years extra life. (I work for a
state gov't agency and the machines were somewhat proprietary in design, so
replacement would have been too expensive and replacing the motherboard was
not feasible).
Last I knew, the GSI Model 1C boards were still available for about $30 at
<http://www.insight.com> and <http://www.cdw.com>.
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