Hard drive

I'm probably not going to answer your question but there might be a hardware compatibility problem trying to install one of the newer large drives on older machines. First is the motherboard/chipset support the drive itself.Some new drives are not backward compatible with ATA/UDMA-33/66/ and your motherboard may only support these drives. That is one issue to look at. Another is that your computer will support this drive but your File allocation table is corrupted or your boot sector is corrupted somehow or someway. Correcting this problem is to use a boot disk with the fdisk utility and format your drive again.

Again, these are not answers to your question but rather items to look at. Others who are more hardware savy will probably beable to accurately tell you what's wrong.

The "best" sollution to your problem is to install a PCI IDE controller card.
These sell for under $30 at many e-tailers.

The card will bypass your motherboards limitations on dealing with large hard drives.
In addition, you will get the full ATA100/133 data transfer rate that your new drive supports.

The only "special" thing you need to do, is set the boot sequence to use SCSI instead of IDE for the boot drive.

You may need to use a "startup" disk to fdisk the drive and remove any partially set up partitions.

Which version of Windows are you using.
You need either W95 2.5 (C) or newer to set up this drive with fewer than 24 partitions.
Even if you are running W98SE, you may want 2 or more partitions.

Please check out the article on partition stratagy at www.aumha.org before setting up the drive.

Chas

How much do you love your acer?

For $200 you can buy a pc from walmart online which would handle your harddrive and have processing power well beyond where you are at.

Another good way to go is renaissance computer centers or find a local pc recycler and pick up at least a 400mghz processored machine. They should be selling in the <=$100.00 range without a drive and it too will handle your drive better.
Just some thoughts for something other than a high end pci drive card in a low end pc.

Small pc retailers also have good access to smaller drives in the 2gig/8gig arena and these would probably work better with your acer to get it up and running again.

Otherwise check out some of the barebone kits at tigerdirect.comnow that you have a sizeable hard drive, diskette drive from the acer, cdrom from the acer?, monitor,.....
good luck

My old P166 could not handle a HDD above 8.4 Gbytes, although I am told there are programs that can overcome that.

I have also found that "not quite so old" PC's (~450Mhz and about 2.5 years old) cannot recognise HDD over 32Gbytes - if I tried, it just froze the system at boot when it tried to detect the HDD.

The good news is, that some of the larger drives (I have only looked at 40 Gbytes drives with this - haven't looked at any larger ones) have jumber settings to limit them to 32Gbytes - Hellofa waste of a 60 Gbyte HDD, but better than blowing your dough if it works.

Stuart