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What size hard drive should I put in my 486 laptop?

T

Tupin

Experienced Member
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St. Louis, MO
I'm getting a laptop sans harddrive from a forum member here, and I've looked for low capacity IDE 2.5 inch drives, and I think I found a perfect 6 GB one. I've looked into using a CF adapter, but getting an actual hard drive is cheaper. I want to run DOS 5 or 6, can it support HDDs of 6 GB?
 
Using DOS 6 to support 6 GB is a little messy (FAT16 file system limits you to a 2GB partition size) unless you partition it into several logical drives. You may have to use a DDO depending on your BIOS. No more than about 300MB would be historically more correct.
 
How exactly would I go partitioning a DOS drive? Just insert the drive, boot it up with a boot disk, and then fdisk to format it into 3 logical drives with 2GB each? What would I name these drives, as I want to use SD cards via a PCMCIA adapter?
 
Tupin said:
How exactly would I go partitioning a DOS drive? Just insert the drive, boot it up with a boot disk, and then fdisk to format it into 3 logical drives with 2GB each? What would I name these drives, as I want to use SD cards via a PCMCIA adapter?
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That's how I do it. However, why use 2GB partitions? Think about the cluster size and also about how easy it is to organize information with more partitions. Have a look at the setup I gave you above. Particularly:

Volume size C 250.7MB (cluster size 4Kb)
Volume size D-K 509.6MB (cluster size 8Kb)
Volume size L 1019.5MB (cluster size 16Kb)
 
Damn ! A DOS machine with 6 gigs. You must have a lot of DOS programs. I wasn't aware one could even have an HDD of that size on Dos (even vers. 6.22 or DR). What BIOS would you have to have ? I'm not being facetious and believe you but I was never aware that was possible on a 486. Even on a Pentium with a 8gig Samsung HD I had to split it into about 4 or 5 fat16 partitions using the Samsung app. And always worrying that the Samsung overlay would fail and the Samsung fd could not restore it. Would it require something like Partition Magic to achieve that ? How would I go about getting rid of the Samsung overlay in order to change it into a modern drive as well as saving the disk content ?

Lawrence


Ole Juul said:
Presumably the bios supports a 6GB HDD. To me that is also the perfect size for DOS. My partitions on a DOS machine look like this.
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Last edited:
Better look up what HD the machine supports (early or late 486?). 2-4GB is what I use for DOS (1 or 2 partitions) if the machine supports it, many do 500MB or so.
 
Micom 2000 said:
Damn ! A DOS machine with 6 gigs. You must have a lot of DOS programs.
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I actually don't use a lot of applications and certainly no games. Mostly just a few very small utilities. To me utilities is where it's at - they do it all. :) That said, for historical and resource purposes, I maintain a large library of utilities which I have been gleaning from BBSs and now the net, over many years. I also keep lots of text files and literary works. Finding things on a computer is much easier than most other places. I love text and i love GREP.

I wasn't aware one could even have an HDD of that size on Dos (even vers. 6.22 or DR). What BIOS would you have to have ? I'm not being facetious and believe you but I was never aware that was possible on a 486.
Click to expand...

DOS 6.22 certainly supports 6GB, so there is no problem there. As others have mentioned, a 486 may or may not support that. My machine (check the link) is a P1 because it was supposed to be a work horse and P1s are readily available, and there was not really any "vintage concerns" involved when I put it together.

Even on a Pentium with a 8gig Samsung HD I had to split it into about 4 or 5 fat16 partitions using the Samsung app. And always worrying that the Samsung overlay would fail and the Samsung fd could not restore it. Would it require something like Partition Magic to achieve that ? How would I go about getting rid of the Samsung overlay in order to change it into a modern drive as well as saving the disk content ?
Click to expand...

Fdisk is quite happy to make partitions until you run out of letters. :) Like I mentioned earlier, it is also worth considering the cluster size. DOS files tend to be small so there could easily be a lot of waste. However with 6GB space is not a big concern. I like the elbow room and it's also nice to have huge ramdrives. :)

Anyway, I don't want to totally hijack the thread here. If there is a concern with being historically appropriate (ie. vintage) then I think Chuck's suggestion of something like 300MB is probably a better choice for a 486.
 
A bit more info:

It's a Zenith Z-Star EX monochromatic laptop from 1994. BIOS is dated 1994.
It has 4MB of RAM, which can be expanded to 8 or 20. I have RAM chips of these sizes, but I'm not sure how to add it.
It's a 486DX2.
 
I have one 486 laptop upgraded with a 2GB drive divided in half, one half SuSE Linux, the other half DOS 6.22/WFW. The other has 500MB divided three ways with OS/2, Dos 6.22/WFW, and Plan 9. This is the system's original drive--I ordered it with a 450MB, the largest available, it arrived with 500MB and a note telling me I got a free upgrade to a larger drive. I also have the first system's original drive, a 350MB drive, which has DOS and an old version of Solaris on it. It gets swapped into one of the systems about once a year.

In each case the setups are what they were when these were in daily use as current systems ('94-97 or thereabouts.) The 2GB drive had Win95 on it at one point, right after I got the larger drive, but I wiped the partition and took it back to DOS/WFW after a year or so. At the time I got the 2GB drive, this was a ridiculously huge drive for a personal machine of any sort. It was a production fallout unit intended for a small sized hot-swap RAID array. I repaired the drive by swapping logic boards with another fallout drive. We couldn't sell a fallout drive, so I got a monster huge drive for my laptop. :) At the time, a large disk or application server under Unix/LMX would have about 4-8GB of disk on it.
 
Ole Juul said:
Anyway, I don't want to totally hijack the thread here. If there is a concern with being historically appropriate (ie. vintage) then I think Chuck's suggestion of something like 300MB is probably a better choice for a 486.
Click to expand...

I keep a bunch of small working drives around just for that reason.
 
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