[ Outline ] · Standard · Linear+ Hard drive compatibility with BIOS and XP

I am thinking of getting a second hard drive and an concerned that it may not be compatible with either my BIOS or winXP. I have heard that some BIOS and WINXP home ed may not see hard drives larger than 137G (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303013). How can I check out if my BIOS is compatible. I currently have a 120G hard drive and a Gateway 1.7GHz computer (about 3 years old).

Not to stray off topic, but yes FAT can be more compatiable with older Win 9x OS's, but that does not make it better.

FAT proven to be quite reliable and is fairly immune to damage. When the system crashes, FAT can "misplace" disk space that was being allocated to a file.
Although it is simpler to manage a few larger volumes, FAT performance degrades with volume size. The distance between the directory and the data increases the disk movement, and larger allocation units waste space. FAT systems require the least memory and are the best choice on small machines.
FAT32 increases the number of bits used to address clusters and also reduces the size of each cluster. The result is that it can support larger disks (up to 2 terabytes) and better storage efficiency (less slack space).

NTFS has features to improve reliability, such as transaction logs to help recover from disk failures. For large applications, NTFS supports spanning volumes, which means files and directories can be spread out across several physical disks.

Sorry just a heads up on the info, not to argue but I felt the same until I came into the light. :D

Not that everything M$ says is true, but here is a link discussing and comparing FAT, 16, 32 to NTFS.
It is very good and goes into very nice detail.

***http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/winpreinst/ntfs-preinstall.mspx

Also can you not just Flash the BIOS??

This post has been edited by boxcrash: Jul 8 2004, 06:19 AM