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Upgrade Packard Bell

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by rick.philips9

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A friend has a Packard Bell PII 300, 128M Ram, SIS PCI Graphics w/2 Meg shared BIOS 1.0. The system BIOS is VESA BIOS Extension Version 2.0. He wants me to replace the hard drive and copy his existing config. to the new one. No problem. (or is there) He was given information that you cannot just replace the Harddrive in a Packard Bell due to the BIOS extension. (???) Basically we want to put in a 20G harddrive and transfer the existing drive config. I am not aware of any problems with doing this so, if anyone is familiar with Packard Bell please respond.

5 replies

by csmith

I did this with a Quantum HD in a Packard Bell that is one model below this one . It went OK.
The customer was running Win98.
The warning that you heard about Packard Bell are legitimate. I have run into some weird BIOS problems in their machines.
If the install doesn't work, don't forget to try the normal mode in the BIOS HD settings, and manually load Cyl, Head, and Sect.
The size may display garbage, but the drive will usually work properly using FAT32.
Regards, Chris

by dcosgrove

One thing that you may run into is the restore software not working. This can even happen if you change the CD. Not a big deal if you can get the software elsewhere.

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