Ping Jef

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

> 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

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

> 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

Thanks, Jef. I bought Crucial PC2700, which I hope will work ok. Yeah,
I'm sure that the old computer had to have the bug that limited it to the
32GB. It was an old Compaq and I know they had models that did have that
limitation, and it would not recognize the 80GB hard drive either. Right
now I am so pleased to have a fairly decent computer for less than $100.
And, I've gotten to use all these spare parts that have been laying around
here for awhile.

Patty
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