[wplug] Installing a new hard drive.

[Luquilla Hughes]

Hey all I bought a new HD, IBM deskstar model DTLA-307045(46.1GB), at the 
computer show weekend before last and have installed it in my Compaq Deskpro 
2000 5166 box. (got a good deal on it.) However it seems that the bios is 
(A) funky, hey it's compaq, and (B) a bit old.
I had found the compaq support site for my model but have not had a chance 
to give it a good going over so the bios may be upgradable, but if we were 
to assume for a minute that it ain't, here's my question.

Would there be any adverse effects of letting my bios think that it is not 
really the 46 GB drive that it is, but the 7 or 8 GB drive that it wants to 
believe that it is?

Other info:
I need to have Windows on this machine, but should fit on the 2.5gb hda 
quite nicely, (might even be able to squeeze in os/2).
It has a network card installed, so if I ever scrape up enough to get a box 
better than a p166 I can move All of the data off the IBM drive to another 
machine, fdisk/reformat, and then move the data back.
There is currently nothing on this box that can't be wiped so I can start 
from scratch.

extraneous trivia:
When I say compaqs bios is funky, it is on the hard drive/floppy. they make 
a seperate partition, type 12h I believe, and put all of the controls and 
system info on it. no partition, no bios access. I had to get the system 
info from compaq floppies(which say booting ms-dos, a whole interesting 
legal/licensing discussion there).
The case is really nice, three thumb screws to open it.

Thanks for reading this far. But that's about it any suggestions are 
appreciated, flames can be fowarded to /dev/null.


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