Re: dell Latitude CPt S500GT upgrade to a larger drive

The message <1175130534.800954.17120@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from ajmoss_throwaway_account_001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx contains these words:

On 28 Mar, 21:27, "Ticker" <mdeackes...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dell Latitude CPt S500GT about 1999 running 500 celeron 4/5gb hard disk
I need to upgrade to a larger drive but not sure what i can go up to
can you
help please

This Toshiba Portege 7010CT (a year older than yours, with a 300MHz
P2) is running with a 120GB hard disk. Gross overkill, but I don't
care.

The BIOS doesn't officially support more than 32GB, which is why
Windows 98 cannot access FAT32 partitions beyond that limit, but
Windows 2000 SP4 and KUbuntu Linux 5.10 both override the BIOS to
allow hard disks of arbitrary size.

You might as well buy that 40GB laptop hard drive that has just been
re-offered in u.a.c. The worst that can happen is that you might only
be able to use 32GB of it.

Or even an 80GB drive (the price difference is so small - sometimes
even less!) and use the "32GB Clip" jumper. On an 80GB drive, you will
be accessing the even faster 32GB part of the drive.

However, if the bios has this restriction (a hangup during the post
with <32GB drives that responds to the 3 finger salute - classic symptom
of the 32GB limit), there's every chance that a post August 1999 bios
update will fix the issue (well, raise the limit to 128GB, allowing, in
practice, the use of 120GB drives).

My slot 1 jetway MoBo (origional bios date of Jan 1999) was fixed by
the one and only ever August 1999 update. Other makes of MoBo of this
vintage, were also sorted by bios updates, usually by several, in some
cases, the manufacturer taking more than a half dozen attempts to
_correctly_ apply the fix (initially raising the limit, arbitarily to
64GB before finally reaching the limit of the ATA hardware used on the
board). In one case, I had to resort to a 'Final Beta' version of the
bios update to fix the problem!

I'd say the obvious thing to do is look on Dell's website for BIOS
updates, especially those with post August 1999 dates.

--
Regards, John.

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