How large a hard disk does my BIOS support?
Early PCs, ones built through 1992-1994, could only recognize disks with up to 528MB (million bytes) of storage. As larger disks became available, special translation programs were needed to utilize the space beyond the supported maximum. In the early 1990s, as a result of a general agreement between PC suppliers and disk companies, the size limit for ATAPI device support (the type of disk drives generally used in most PCs) was generally expanded to as much as 8.4GB (billion bytes). Recently, disk drive limits were again expanded, to 33GB. The latest BIOS (AwardBIOS or PhoenixBIOS) supports drives up to 136GB for a 16 head system (increasing as the number of heads increases). Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know how large a disk drive your system can support without actually testing it and in many cases today’s high capacity drives could not be tested by your manufacturer because they were not available until some time after the system had originally shipped.
Early PCs, ones built through 1992-1994, could only recognize disks with up to 528MB (million bytes) of storage. As larger disks became available, special translation programs were needed to utilize the space beyond the supported maximum. In the early 1990s, as a result of a general agreement between PC suppliers and disk companies, the size limit for ATAPI device support (the type of disk drives generally used in most PCs) was generally expanded to as much as 8.4GB (billion bytes). Recently, disk drive limits were again expanded, to 33GB. The latest BIOS (AwardBIOS or PhoenixBIOS) supports drives up to 136GB for a 16 head system (increasing as the number of heads increases). Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know how large a disk drive your system can support without actually testing it and in many cases today’s high capacity drives could not be tested by your manufacturer because they were not available until some time after the system had originally shipped. To test a new disk drive
