I have a Pentium 166MHz System with 32MB EDO RAM. I purchased a new HDD of 20GB Seagate and connected properly to the system. The system couldn't recognise the full capacity of the HDD and shown only 8GB. Then I used Seagate OnTrack DiskManager and could use the entire 20GB. What I want to ask is, was this a limitation of the "Motherboard BIOS" or the "Processor". If now I change to another recent model Motherboard with the same processor, will it recognise the entire 20GB of HDD space without using Seagate OnTrack DiskManager. Please Help...

It's the bios. Whether a motherboard will recognize the entire drive doesn't depend on the cpu. Check the specs of the newer board either in the manual or on the manufacturer's site. Sometimes a bios upgrade is needed. But that info should be on their site. If the newer board does see the entire drive you'll still have DiskManager installed and your OS will run off of that. I think the only way to remove the overlay is to boot from a floppy, run fdisk and remove the partitions, although I could be wrong. If you do remove the partitions you'll have to reinstall everything. When the computer boots it should tell you what size HD it sees, assuming it's configured right in cmos. Sometimes the screens flash by pretty quick. You can hit the pause button on your keyboard to pause it so you can read it.

This is a limitation of Windows. It has nothing to do with your units' hardware. After loading Windows I would suggest that you use Partition Magic to stretch the 8gig partition into the full 20gig. You can then remove Partition Magic if you want. I'm not sure what that DiskManager program is like, but I know Partition Magic is the Industry Standard. is a good place to download a copy of Partition Magic.

FJ, Learn a bit about PC's and Windows before pretending know everything and shouting other more educated users down. If you dont know, dont bulls**it I guess you are only learning how to use a PC and that you have only ever used a fairly new system.

I agree with dd. FJ, it's the BIOS. The O/S has NOTHING to do with it.

A BIOS UPGRADE WOULD HELP. USING THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE AS WELL. I believe depending what version of windows was being used The original version of windows 95 would only allow a maximum of a 2 gig logical drive. The FDISK version in the upgraded OSR2 version of windows 95 extended the maximum partition size to 8 gigs. Seeing that the user was using a p166 and it only allowed an 8 gig partition, i would guess they were using windows 95 osr2.

DAVEINCAPS, A lot of thanx. I was actually thinking the same before, but not sure at all about it.Now your opinions made it stronger and I implemented the same and succeeded too. Hearty thanx again. Mr FJ really needs some good training. He should know that, the HDD is detected by the system before the operating system is loaded into memory.