Old system vs Big HDD

Installing a large drive will have problems during the setup phase because the system will not be able to recognize the drive to set the partition table.
Data may be lost if you boot the system and the bios does nto recognize the drive.

i would think once it was working it would be safe if you started fresh with the drive. if you can get the system to fdisk and partition it. if you are duping the old hard drive over i have seen problems with data corruption when drive is replaced with larger one system *almost* supports right. hence the caveat about starting fresh install.
shouldn't this also work if took to newer machine and partitioned there in one or two small partitions. then brought it over...
you might enjoy reading what you find at support.microsoft.com searching for 'large hard disk install'
you don't mention os so i won't either. except to say that each os has own funny business about hd geometry.
in older system you only have limited way of 'translating' drive geometry. only a certain number of bits were allocated to translating the drive. if it will see your drive at all it will only see small part of it. but i don't see why you couldn't partition as much as you could and try it out. heeding dmiles warning about data corruption. you got nothing on this 60gb drive now right? so just try it.
i am telling you nothing you don't know but thing to do in your case imho is get 3rd party like Promise hd controller. your win9x system will love having fast hard disk and only costs about $30
but you knew all that....:>)

IF you are able to partition and format the drive, it should continue to function.

The greatest chance for a problem will come IF you move the drive to a different PC that does NOT have the same BIOS HDD size limit.

I know you said no philosophy, but if it were my system, I would install a PCI IDE controller card and have access to the full capacity of the drive.

Chas

I've been using >8GB drives in older (pre-'96) PCs, under both Win95b and Win98SE... I simply partition the drives with Ranish Partition Manager, ignore the error message complaints, and use it. So far, I've not encountered any problems -- including moving the drive(s) back and forth between various PCs -- other than the standard issues of DOS drive-access limitations and Windows version incompatabilities. No data has been lost.

Unfortunately, I've never had any drive large enough to try this with anything >32GB, so I don't know if those drives would pose yet another 'barrier'. Poverty sucks...

But; yes -- it can be done -- in Windows. If you need the drivespace for another OS, however, you may be out of luck?

Fdisk the drive and format it what ever size the BIOS recognizes it as, and you should have no problem with it except for not being able to use the full capacity.

Thanks for all these responses,
i think megasurfer's was the one i was hoping to hear.

it's not easy getting hold of a small brand-new or reliable-s/h hdd (10 gig max).

in the ?4? ($4$) "bang for buck" scenario a 60 or 80-gb is better value than say a 30-gb which are still available.

i am thinking that this old computer may soon be retired and the drive can then be formatted and relocated elsewhere.

oH, and thanks for accepting my "know it all" approach, it was just a focussing device, seemed to work too!

all my life i have tried to "know more today than i did yesterday" but, i am now at an age where i'm happy if i just know different things today than i knew yesterday!

Thanks Guys (n gals)

PS.
by the way "Sarge" it's win2k, and i have read enough replies to always respect your (humble) opinion.

If the BIOS will read the drive you can fdisk and format to that size. If the BIOS doesn't read the drive you can use one of the programs like EZ Bios or something to read the full capacity.

In answer to your most important question, NO! I wouldn't trust this for setup for important data.

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