*** Adding an ATA 100/133 to a 486 ***

[CaesaR]

I have an old stone age 486 & 386 computer and i want to add a 6gig ATA 100 or 133(not sure) drive onto one of them because right now they both run windows 3.11 and i'd like to upgrade to win95 and go fossil huntin' for more RAM for it....but the point is i need to somehow get that drive on that machine whilst spending the least amount of $$$



Any help is appreciated




-pat

[Holst]

easyest option will be an ATA 100 controller card.
Will be faster and not too expensive.

If you dont have any PCI slots then it will have to be ISA (might be very hard to find)

The other option is to slow the drive down to ATA33/66 so it will work with the 486 controller.

Most manufacturers have there own utility for doing this, ive dont the same thing to an IBM and Seagate drive with minimal problems, although it can sometimes be a bugger configuring the drive if its too big and there isnt a bios update.

What are you planning on doing with an old 486 ?

[SteveI]

I'm actually reparing a socket7 Pentium233 system atm. The on board controller is 16.6, one level below dma & ATA33. If memory serves me correctly, 2gig was the max size it could handle. Those utilities that allow old controllers to handle bigger disks slow down slow drives to a crawl. Also, I highly doubt a 6 gig drive was built ATA100 or 133 capable... most likely it is ATA33 (ATA66 if you are lucky).

You can go get a ATA100 controller cheap, at staples I think they have a sale for under $25 ATM. That would solve that issue. They are only made for PCI, ISA controllers go way back, and probably wouldn't help... some 486s had off board controllers.

Good Luck.

[The Spyder]

Also- there were only two manufacters of u100 6gig harddrive- i think you have a u66- they are IBM and Fugi-
I have aBUNCH of old ram- PM me- also i doubt that win 95 would run- drivers would be a pain-
Spyder

[CaesaR]

im planning on using it as a word pro just for typing up school crap and i dont want to use the crap ass 300mb HD that it comes with.

[The Spyder]

I hope that the 6gig you have will work~! I would find a 800mg or 1gig and ghost win 3.1 so that you know you can always go back!
Spyder

[Aedan]

I'm not sure why you need an ATA100/133 controller to be honest, unless those boards have no on-board controller, or the on-board controller is PIO only.

The issue with the size of the hard disk is completly down to the BIOS - the speed of the IDE interface plays no part in determining the maximum size of the hard disk. If you're lucky, there may be a BIOS upgrade to take you over the 2Gb mark. (Yes, that means an interface that can only do PIO can still talk to large disks.)

You're still likely to find the machine slow, as Win95 doesn't exactly excel on a 486 class machine. On the other hand, that might well be enough for you!

AidanII

[loop]

I had an old Intel board that only supported up to 8gig drives and I wanted to put my 30gig drive on it.

All I did was format as a 30gig on a machine that had a bios that supported drives that big and then put the drive back on the old Intel board. The bios didnt read anything for the drive and windows 98 said it was a 30gig drive so I was happy.

Dont know how well win95 will like that though.

[SugarJ]

Originally posted by AidanII
Win95 doesn't exactly excel on a 486 class machine.

I have a compaq contura notebook, 486 dx4 100Mhz, 32 MB RAM w/ 400 MB HDD, PCMIA 56K modem. Originally came with 3.11, but it's more stable running 95. Office 97 and Eudora run fine. Bigger HDD would be nice.

[SickBoy]

I revived a few 486's and put Windows 95 on them a few years back. If you can hack getting the drives that are attached to the ATA100 controller to appear for Win95 setup, you're good to go. Otherwise you may need to try loading Win95 on the old HD and adding the controller/drive afterwards.

Make sure you stuff that thing with as much RAM as you can find, I'd say hopefully 32 MB or more. Win95 really starts to open up with at least that much RAM.

sb

[Samuknow]

I have run 98se on a couple of 486 boxes with no problems. There is more hardware support on 98. Also If I remember correctly 4.3 gig is the largest partition older machines will see. There is some software that comes with some drives that set up the drive for older computers. This is in the bios so unless there is an update available prob wont work. Actuall I think the name of the utility is EZBios. Creates a bios on the drive itself.

Good luck