HDD Size limit?

[Bandit]

Hi

My friend is trying to get a bigger HDD and she called DELL and they told her she could only get up to a 30GB HDD. They tried to rip her off and wanted to charge her $100 for a 20 GB!!!

Anyway is there a way around this 30GB limit? I would like her to get an 80GB since it is the best value right now. I am almost 100% sure the one she has right now is an EIDE ATA66. Tell me if more info is needed.

thanks!
Bandit

[YARDofSTUF]

some older motherboards wont see past a certain size, a pci controller card might work, not sure tho.

[YeOldeStonecat]

There used to be things called "Drive Overlays" in the past, where you could "fool" the BIOS into thinking the new hard drive was a smaller size than it actually was. Example, in the early to mid pentium days, most motherboard BIOS only recognized drives up to 8.4 gigs in size. If you bought a 12 gig drive, you'd need a drive overlay. The BIOS would only see an 8.4 gig drive, but the OS actually saw all 12 gigs.

Problem is....many times those drive overlays caused problems, reliability problems, other limitations when it came to moving data later on to another drive, sometimes it didn't always work if you needed to boot from a boot disk, etc. I really didn't like them.

If you purchase a retail boxed version of the hard drive (opposed to OEM) you usually get a disk with a software bundle that included a drive overlay.

Although I haven't seen them in recent years (probably haven't looked...as haven't needed them)

Yes small hard drive are getting expensive now (more expensive than some larger drives)...supply and demand...as they aren't made anymore.