Hard Drive Size limits

[RedCoat999]

I have an old PII 450 system and was about to buy a hard drive. I know that there is probably a hard drive size limit for this vintage of motherboard (there are no further bios updates from Dell on this board by the way). Is the limit around 120GB? Any way to test for this limit?
Thanks

[malore]

This article contains some info you might find useful.

Basically the limit is 137.4GB, but you can buy larger drives that come with a PCI IDE card that have there own drivers that should overcome this limit.

If I remember correctly support for LBA wasn't added until windows XP SP1, so that's how new it is.

[Xleon]

I'm using an old MSI PIII 450 and I've got a 128Gb drive on it work a treat ! Any bigger, I'm not sure about, not been able to afford anything larger so far.

[freddysilk]

I guess it depends on how you format it. I have a 160GB drive that I use just for recording movies, mp3, etc. My bios didn't recognize it as a 160GB when I installed it in my PC but when I placed it in an external USB 2.0 box and formatted it - it recognized it as a 160GB drive. I added some movies and mp3's on it and placed it back in the PC case. When I booted up Windows XP, it recognized it as a 160GB drive and all of my files were there. To this day, no problems.

If you have an external USB 2.0 or firewire box - place it in there, format it, add a few files, and then install it back into your PC

** I didn't even need a separate controller for it either **

[SHS]

Here best Ultimate Slipstream Guide (almost) from DosFreak which base on what I started.
http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/...pic.php?t=21978
Yes you need any Add-on PCI IDE card.