Compaq 5340 drive size problem

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I've looked for any earlier address of this question, and have found nothing, though I did see the WIM notes about Compaq bios upgrade (or the absence thereof). I'm trying to upgrade a 4 GB Compaq Presario 5340 by a rather large leap to a 120 GB Seagate HD in WIN98. I realize (now) that the system is not supposed to recognize anything over 80 GB (which Compaq gratuitiously confirms). But I have partitioned the drive into 12 partions of approximately 10 GB each--the intent being to get around the size limitation that way, under the assumption that the boot drive should register only as a 10 GB drive, well within the size limit. However, when I reset the jumpers to make the new drive master, it hangs in POST just as some BIOS information sources predict. I installed Compaq's one and only softpaq for this model, but no help (if anything, it has destabilized the system). The system recognizes all 12 partions in slave mode, but I can't boot from the top drive if I set it as master, though in content it perfectly mirrors the smaller original drive which does work as master. Any solutions, or am I going to have to shell out, as Compaq suggests, for a smaller and less satisfactory 80 GB drive? I need a lot of image storage space now, so bigger is definitely better. Any help would be appreciated.

[KachiWachi]

What's wrong with using a "compatible" boot drive, and a "large" slave drive to house your images?

I could do that, but I omitted mention of plans for the original small drive. It was my intention to speed up the system by freeing the smaller drive entirely for virtual memory (Compaq's automatic backup on the second partition fills up over time with no visible means to clear other than removing all backup files. The second partition is also allocated to virtual memory, so as it fills with unwanted backup files, the system bogs down until it barely runs at all). It's also the original drive that came with the computer in 1999, so would represent less risk to the system if it failed as a non-bootable drive, but it's looking more and more like I will have to give up my planned architecture in favor of the less desirable alternative.

[cp]

according to your post i suggest that the drive is detected in the bios without crashing it, right? i'm not talking about a correct size detection but rather about the ability to boot from it.
IF so..get a recent operating system (WiXP SP2 / W2k SP4+ or any recent Linux) and you can use the whole drive without any limitations (despite all bios hassles).

I don't know about Linux, but the system won't run WinXP. Specs are inadequate on this model. Don't have a clue where I'd get RAM chips this old (or how to match them with what's in it already) and can't afford to replace the computer at this point, so will just reconfigure to run windows-only on the old drive and spread the remaining apps across the partitions on the new one. It will do; just frustrating that I can't get it to work as planned.

[cp]

i don't quite get the point why you partitioned the disk to 12 (!!!) 10GB partitions. is there any (reasonable) reason for this? i guess you know that you'll lose some space adding another partition to your drive?

according to a quick web search your board is equipped with a SIS530 chipset and an AMD K6-2 400MHz. it will accept any PC100/PC133 SDRAM / DIMM upto total max. 384MB. i guess there are 2 or 3 DIMM sockets..so you might go for 2 or 3 128MB sticks and push the machine to 256MB which enables you to flawlessly run W2K and WiXP. You might even upgrade to K6-2 500 or 533.

though W98 does not support 48bit LBA (at least not out of the box) you should be safe using anything like format.com / fdisk.com below 128GB. just be sure to get the lastest versions of all those files since microsoft managed to ship seriously bugged versions of fdisk and format.

I recently finished a series of computer trouble shooting classes at one of the local colleges, wherein it was stated that 10 GB was the recommended max for Win98 drive recognition. That has since proven to be incorrect (or perhaps not, given the trouble I'm having), but that was part of the reason for the partitions. The other was division of functionalities into like areas: text processing, image processing, online services, games, etc. The ultimate aim was to get everything off the original small drive to allow more storage space and establishing a larger virtual memory on a completely separate drive instead of leaving it on the same disk. It's a slow system that tends to bog down even worse as the system save partition fills up, so more efficiency in both drive operation and file structure (from my point of view as user) was the intent. This whole process (among other things) has identified some Compaq quirks that will certainly factor into any future buying decisions.

Thanks for the other information. That will help. I've almost got it reconfigured with Windows on the main drive and the other apps on the second, but (if matters could be worse), I now find that I'm missing a .dll file necessary for MS Word: MS097.dll. It doesn't seem to exist anywhere on recovery disks or on a later version of 98SE. I haven't done anything to the system that should have affected that, so I can only guess that the recently run system recovery failed in part. If it's not one thing.... Thanks for all your help.

[KachiWachi]

He might actually be able to stick a + series CPU in that thing...and run it overclocked to 600MHz!

I wasn't gonna mention the partition thing...I figured he had his reasons for doing that.