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Old PC & New HDD

In my old Acer Entra 500 (Pentium 150 MHz), I placed a brand new Seagate 10.2GB Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Nothing much to write about actually - until I found that the computer only reported the HDD as having 8.4GB!

After consulting 'experts'; their opinion was, there was nothing much that could be done about this 'because your PC is old', was the popular explanation.

So I consulted the WWW and after browsing through a few pages on the subject, I found out that there is actually a couple of ways around this problem.

The first is to update my BIOS; and so I contacted ACER for information on the updated BIOS for my old V55 Mainboard.  For your information, this Acer computer was purchased in January 1997 and so just 4 years old at the time of this writing.

Well, my single call to Acer's Help Centre drew a cool "We're sorry, the MB is so old, we don't have an updated BIOS for it any longer..." response.  Another reason why I will never ever buy a BRANDED computer ever again; there's no difference in their after sales support.

Also, they used to have a support page on the WWW - for Acer Entra 500, complete with links to drivers and software upgrade which mysteriously disappeared early this year (2001) from their site at http://www.acer.com.my.  

So back to my problem - the last alternative is to NOT use Microsoft's FDISK to partition my new HDD but download and use SEAGATE's own Disc Wizard 2000.  

Basically DISC WIZARD 2000 somehow recognizes that your system is old and installs a driver to your system so that Windows correctly reports the HDD size even though your BIOS doesn't!

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