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Hardware

Finding BIOS Upgrades? 83

Posted by Cliff from the usful-tidbits-to-know dept.
CrazyDwarf asks: "I dug up and old system that my company was about to toss in the dumpster and decided to load Linux on it. My problem: the BIOS will not recognize more than 500 MB of the HDD. I don't have a CD-ROM for this PC. I was looking for a BIOS upgrade download, but AWARD wants me to buy it from some third party. If I could afford to buy it from them, I wouldn't be doing all this, I'd just get a CD-Rom and move on. Where are some good places for me to go find a free (no cost) download to upgrade my BIOS? I have been searching for an hour on Google and have not really found anything."
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Finding BIOS Upgrades? More

Finding BIOS Upgrades?

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  • How old? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jester998 ( 156179 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @10:11PM (#3941821) Homepage
    Hmm... depending on how old the system actually is, it might not even HAVE downloadable BIOS updates. IIRC, most 486 systems and even some 586-based systems didn't have Flash ROMs... to upgrade the BIOS, you had to physically replace the BIOS CMOS.

    If the motherboard does, indeed, have a flashable BIOS, then try looking up the part/model number on either the manufacturer's site or Google.

    - Jester

    • Re:How old? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Pogue Mahone ( 265053 )
      The old MoBos used to have socketed EPROMS for the BIOS - quite easy to replace, as long as you have a programmer. But buy a new device, so that if all goes pear-shaped you can plug the old one back in. Anyway, you don't need your BIOS to recognise more than 500MB. Simply make a small partition (10MB should be enough) at the start of the disk, and put your kernel etc. there. Mount it as /boot. That should work with most good distros. Apart from boot time, a Linux system doesn't need the BIOS. The only exception to this BIOS problem that I know of is with some old caching disk controllers. I have one that has a 2048-cylinder hard limit in the controller, which limits the disk size to about 1 GB. But that was in an absolutely ancient (ca. 10 years old) 486i - all ISA.
      • Sometimes a BIOS won't boot off an IDE drive unless the entire drive is below a certain size. That's what older drives are kept around for. I used to keep old 40MB IDE drives (the smallest in the WD Caviar series) around for use as the first drive in a Linux machine. It's an excellent use for old hoary stuff like that to make it your boot partition.
    • I believe you may be recalling wrongly. I never came across a 486 that didn't have a flashable BIOS.

  • There is an workaround (Score:3, Informative)

    by ljaguar ( 245365 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @10:17PM (#3941844) Homepage Journal
    Boot from floppy.

    Your problem is that you can't _boot_ from a HD larger than 500MB -- because as soon as Linux kernel is loaded, BIOS isn't needed any more anyways. All you need to to is load the kernel somehow and all the limitations of BIOS doesn't exist anymore.

    Then whatever you've got connected to IDE (zip, cdrom, any HD) will work because Linux kernel is up-to-date with things.

    To repeat myself, after Linux kernel is loaded, the kernel takes over. BIOS simply isn't consulted again.

    Of course, some other OS's like DOS still accesses disk through BIOS, so DOS wouldn't work.
    • Your problem is that you can't _boot_ from a HD larger than 500MB -- because as soon as Linux kernel is loaded, BIOS isn't needed any more anyways.

      Wouldn't it also work to simply put a /boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.

      • Re:There is an workaround (Score:4, Informative)

        by ninewands ( 105734 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @10:52PM (#3941995)
        Wouldn't it also work to simply put a /boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.

        You are correct sir ...

        It is my understanding that a separate /boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.

        Once the kernel is loaded, the IDE drivers will handle the disk at the hardware level and BIOS limitations become moot.

        I've never had to fight with the 500 MB limit, but the kernel handily defeated the 2 GB limit of my old P166-MMX mobo ...
        • It is my understanding that a separate /boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.

          It is my understanding that you are wrong.

          The problem at hand is that the BIOS cannot be configured to correctly acknowledge the drive in the first place.

          If your solution held, we could have >500MB HD work in DOS by keeping the size of the partitions below 500MB. (Because it would boot off the first partition fine.) But it doesn't work like that. We are not looking at the size of _partition_, but the size of the _hard drive_. As in BIOS cannot even get to master boot record.

          What you are referring to is how far in the drive the boot records can read. You are thinking of LILO and stuff.

          The limit was that the BIOS could read till so many cylinders to load the real OS. Thus LILO (in the boot record) could not read past 512 cylinders (not sure about the exact number). It can be solved by using some kind of lba option in lilo.conf. (by using the logical block address instead of CHS)
          • I thought that this is what the user-mode (mode 42? 43?) was for. So long as you could put in the correct (or compatible) CHS values, the BIOS would happily churn away, even if the values did not address the entire disk.
          • The limit with many BIOSes is that they stored the cylinder as a 10-bit number, which means they could only load up to the first 1024 (0 - 1023) cylinders.

            But as long as the kernel was below the first 1024 cylinders (by making a /boot partition, and making it the first partition on the disk (not necessarily first in the partition table, but at the first physical location on the HD) and then making your other partitions come after it, you can circumvent the problem).

            And the disk size limitations of DOS were a combinations of the limitations of FAT16 and the BIOS.

            If the BIOS isn't even acknowledging the HD's presense, then:
            1)The jumper settings aren't configured properly on the HD (master, slave, cable select, etc.)
            2)The disk is FUBAR
            3)The BIOS settings are wrong
            4)The BIOS's IDE autodetection can't deal with the disk for whatever reason

            Check to see if other HDs (preferrably of similar size and on the same IDE controller on the same priority (master or slave)) work or not. And remember to make sure the jumpers are set correctly and try manually entering the values for your HD.
          • It is my understanding that you are the one who is wrong, because you are proscribing to Linux the limitations of DOS.

            DOS uses the BIOS for disk access during normal operation, hence the limitations you describe. Linux uses the BIOS only to load /boot, which should be easily accessable by the BIOS as long as it is a small primary partition in the first cylinders of the drive.

            The hard part will be setting the partitions, which may have to be done on a motherboard that doesn't suffer those limitations.

            • Sigh.
              No, I'm doing nothing of the sort.

              You can't access the primary partition, because you cannot even access the disk. You cannot access the disk, because the BIOS won't work correctly with the disk because, well, that's why it's called a BIOS limitation.

              And the correct wording would be: lilo uses the BIOS only to load the kernel (you don't _load_ "/boot." wtf does that mean anyways?), which should be easily accessable by the BIOS as long as it is a small primary partition in the first cylinders of the drive. Remember, it's lilo that loads the kernel, and it's lilo which is under the limitation of BIOS. and BIOS can't get to lilo. I sound like a parrot. Why do I have to repeat myself?
  • for hard drives that replaces the bios.

    Relevant Search [google.com]
    • This sounds like something like Western Digital's "EZ-Bios" ... which even WD's Tech Support recommends that people NOT use unless there is NO other choice.

      Since it is possible to finesse the BIOS limitation with a small /dev/hda1 of say, 10 MB, EZ-Bios and its equivalents sound like A Very Bad Idea(TM).
      • I used EZ-Disk (I think that's the actual name) and it worked just fine. The Lilo manual said that it was compatible, and my computer was having a lot of trouble seeing the 11.5 gig disk.

        That was a while ago though, I don't know how it would work with a larger disk.
        • Unless you have a BIOS limitation on your hands, it is not at all recommended that you use EZ-BIOS (which is the correct name).

          I have bunch of horrible experiences with it, which unbelievably enough, I can't remember fully.

          Numero Uno biggy is if you _ever_ boot from floppy (from motherboard BIOS). If you boot from floppy, you are _bypassing_ the ez-bios loader, and the disk becomes unusable.

          Hmm, actually, I believe EZ-BIOS gives you an option to boot from floppy _after_ it loads itself, but you are still out of luck if you try to boot from CD (or zip, or scsi, or any other boot option from the motherboard).

          Like I said, I can't remember all the bad things with it; my mind must be blocking out the traumatic events or something. :-P

          It's actually pretty transparent and It Just Works (tm) for the most of the times. I remember using it because I simply didn't know what it was in the beginning. But when I tried to mangle drives and switch OS's and other stuff like that, it was damn hard to get by.
          • EZ-Drive has a configuration menu that you can operate.

            You boot from the hard drive, then EZ-Drive loads, then EZ-Drive gives you a menu that you can use to boot off the floppy.

            I don't know about booting from the CD-Rom, but you are almost certainly right about booting from a zip or scsi drive. EZ-Drive is not the best software, but Linux DOES know about it and will do the right thing when it sees it.
        • OK, we were both wrong. It's EZ-Drive

          I found the large disk howto, and it says:

          Linux does support OnTrack Disk Manager since version 1.3.14, and EZ-
          Drive since version 1.3.29. Some more details are given below.

          And then below, it says:

          5. Kernel disk translation for IDE disks

          If the Linux kernel detects the presence of some disk manager on an
          IDE disk, it will try to remap the disk in the same way this disk
          manager would have done, so that Linux sees the same disk partitioning
          as for example DOS with OnTrack or EZ-Drive. However, NO remapping is
          done when a geometry was specified on the command line - so a
          `hd=cyls,heads,secs' command line option might well kill compatibility
          with a disk manager.

          The remapping is done by trying 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 255 heads
          (keeping H*C constant) until either C

          What that means is that if you're using Linux, you probably don't need this thing. You just put your kernel in the first part of the disk that the BIOS can see and pass the parms to the kernel on the lilo boot line.

          If you're dual booting with Windows, then you probably will need this EZ-Drive. And in that case, you do NOT want to specify the hd parameters to the kernel. The kernel knows about EZ-Drive and will do the right thing.
      • Ok, first let me state that I WORK for WD tech support, hence I'm probably the most qualified person to answer this question, also there will be stuff in here that's my opinion and not the one of the company .

        Now, having said that, let me address the issue of EZ-BIOS. I don't know where you heard that we don't reccommend it, but from what I've seen on other posts here a lot of people are basing the descriptions of it on OLD versions of our software (and therefore of EZ-BIOS). We haven't used OnTrack for our software for several years now. What we DO reccommend is not using EZ-BIOS on a system that doesn't need it...that makes sense, doesn't it? Linux with kernel version 2.2 or above (I believe, or is it 2.0? Anyway if you're still running 2.0 or below I would HIGHLY reccommend upgrading), Win2k or Win XP don't need BIOS support, so we tell people don't use it with those OS'es. In cases like that, we just have them set it up in the BIOS as type User, 1023 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors, and mode of Normal (or LBA Mode disabled). This sets the drive up as about 528 MB and allows the BIOS to boot to the drive, load up the kernel/ntldr, and continue on its merry way. Again, we do NOT reccommend EZ-BIOS for use on systems like this because it's not needed.

        On the other hand, anybody with Win9x and a system with a BIOS limit (8.4 or 32 GB limit most often) are probably going to be best off using it. In the over 1 year I've been working here, I think we've had ONE single call with a computer where EZ-BIOS wouldn't work on the system. Now there are other circumstances where EZ-BIOS may have a conflict with another piece of software on the computer. Most software that writes to the boot track or tries to control the boot process is not going to work with it; common culprits include Roxio GoBack, System Commander, and Partition Magic (which writes its own info in the partition tables and basically makes the partitions unreadable by anything else).
  • Old enough, by the sound of things, that running X would likely be painful. You should be able to squeeze a non-GUI install into 500M without too much difficulty. Check out TinyApps [tinyapps.org] for so small distros.

    • I don't think TinyApps is what you meant:
      Virtually all of the programs listed here are free of charge and for use under Windows..."How about BeOS, *nix, Amiga, QNX, etc?", I am asked. Those who are comfortable using these operating systems need no such guide as this...
      I did google up some tiny Linux directories here [linuxaddict.com] and here [linuxant.hit.bg], and of course there's TomsRtBt [toms.net].
    • I was trying to find something to install on a 500M HD to salvage an old system. I had a Caldera 2.2 disk and a RH 5.1 disk in the archive. They both installed nicely and X worked about as snappily as Win 95 might have on the same system.

      The install claimed that the Caldera needed 160M, and with that size HD, there weren't options for the install. The RH gave options, although I just took the default workstation. It needed about 325M.

      The RH stayed, and it is working pretty well.

  • How I find old BIOS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by itwerx ( 165526 )
    1 - Search Google for your complete mbd model# (in quotes if there's any dashes in it)
    2 - Somewhere in the search results there will be a link or reference to an appropriate file.
    3 - Try to download the file; if you can't then do another search using just that filename (in quotes again).

    This has always worked for me.

    (Aaack! I just replied to an "Ask Slashdot" and told them to use Google!
    And here I swore I'd never reply to another troll...)

  • Openbios might be tha ticket (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cardhore ( 216574 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @11:02PM (#3942032) Homepage Journal
    OpenBIOS [linux.de] might work on your board.

    OpenBIOS will be a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among it's features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without any native binary code. Thus it is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, x86-64 and IA-64. Additionally OpenBIOS targets the embedded systems sector, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal. Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Apple, IBM, CodeGen and others. More information on OpenBIOS is available on the About OpenBIOS page
    • On a similar note, LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] is some sort of ubercompressed, stripped-down linux kernel with some hardware-specific instructions that replaces a conventional BIOS, and then can activate a second-level boot loader like LILO. I don't know motherboard models, so I'm not sure if the project is geared more toward servers. The list of supported motherboards is here [lanl.gov].
  • Why does it seem like this is the first "Ask Slashdot" in quite some time that actually falls under the rubric of "News for Nerds, Things that Matter"???

  • Two alternate solutions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by inkfox ( 580440 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2002 @11:21PM (#3942104) Homepage
    Firstly, you can just boot off a floppy. The BIOS doesn't need to understand the drive, so long as the kernel does.

    Secondly, you can likely boot off the drive if you go into the BIOS configuration and manually specify the correct number of heads and cylinders/sectors and just fib about the number of tracks. If you boot Linux from a small boot partition at the start of the drive, you're likely just fine.

    • That should have been - correct number of heads and sectors, and fib about the number of tracks/cylinders.

      Maybe obvious. Just being anal.

    • I had the same problem. My solution was to use a 500 MB hard disk to boot. It might have worked if I simply partitioned a small boot device on a larger drive but I used the disk I had. The other disk is now a 2 GB, but it could just as well be 20 or 200 GB. The kernel does not use crusty old BIOS routines after boot and can see anything just as well on any machine.

      Making the second drive the home directory was as easy as dropping the hard drive in, formatting it with cfdisk, adding a file system with mkext2fs, coppying my files and changing a single line in /etc/fstab and rebooting. Rebooting was optional. It took way less time than fooling around with a bios upgrade that might or might not work. If ever I need another IDE channel, I've got an old 16 bit card that supposedly gives me one, but two devices are enough for me for now.

      Yep, the 66MHz 486 is still AOK as an ftp server. No GUI needed, never down for anything but power fails, always chugging along but always quiet. Thank you Debian.

  • Chuck the thing in the dumpster.

    The days of "I can run linux great on a 486" are long over. If you decide to run a desktop system with a recent version of KDE or GNOME, even a slow pentium 2 is brought to it's knees.

    My advice to you would be to pick up a cheap PC from somewhere that is 733+ MHz... you should be able to find something for less that $200.
    • Who says he planned on using KDE or GNOME? I'm running a 486 laptop without X installed, and it's blazingly fast - and very useful. I write papers on it with vim, print from it, connect to the net via links, check my email, and even play the occasional game of nethack.

      A slightly beefier system sits to my left - a P75, running Ion [cs.tut.fi], which uses very few system resources. It has X installed, and is quite nice for doing development work.

      $200 is still a significant chunk of change - that's two months of food for me, or almost a month's rent, for example. A free system is not something to be turned up - you just don't install the bloatware that most people are clamoring for.
      • Where do you live that $200 is almost a month's rent?

        that seems quite incredible in this inflated world we live in... I'm living at home with the family for a few months and I still pay more for my room.

        When I was renting a single apartment it was more like $1200 a month. Yeah, I'm saving a lot so I can get in to the market when it hits bottom later this year.
        • I live in Western Massachusetts, where I split a three bedroom apartment with two friends. My share of the rent (with the smallest room) is $250; the most expensive room (and obviously the largest) is $325. Bills come to about $250 a month (food, utilities, gas, aikido lessons, etc.). Throw another $100 a month in for sundry expenses.

          I figure that $600 a month isn't bad for a student living on the cheap; diet is actually pretty easy (being a vegitarian), and when you're not spending a lot on food you have some extra cash to throw about.

          I don't know a ton about the market - making money simply doesn't interest me. I'd rather go hiking. :)
        • Where are you living that rent is so high?

          I'm paying $625 for a spacious 2-bedroom appartment with a laundry room. Back when I did the roommate thing my rent was never over $300. $1200 would get me a 2- to 4-bedroom house, depending on location. I'm in California, so even that is a bit inflated compared to other parts of the country.

          $1200 for a 1-bedroom sounds like Bay Area prices to me. You do know that most of the rest of the country is significantly cheaper, don't you?

        • Why does everyone go directly to the city, and do not pass go. My rent is $350/mo. Yeah its in Montana, but I have a 10 minute drive to work, and I'm about a 5 minute walk to the woods. Its not the biggest place in town, but it meets my single needs just fine. I have a cool job, and enjoy life here quite a bit.
    • I ran KDE 2.2.2 on a 486/66 with 24MB of RAM for a while, and it was OK for basic web browsing. It took a while to start up, but once up and running it was quite usable (in fact, more so than the crappy celery 400 system which it replaced - On-board video sucks)
  • When you buy a new hard drive, (retail packaged) you get a nice floppy with a program that allows your older BIOS's to see the big drive.

    You could try Maxtor or Western Digitals web sites, they have them up for downloading in the support section.

    If you aren't using a Maxtor or WD drive, try downloading an older version, or 'modify' it.
  • Be sure to try Wim' Bios page [wimsbios.com] Click the award or ami bios id link at the top and you will be directed to a page the can identify the motherboard manifacturer based on the bios id (the string of numbers at the bottom of the screen during post). Armed with that knowledge, you can then go to that companies site and look for your particular board. It has helped me locate bios' for no-name boards many times. As an aside, I don't know much about Asian culture, but it seems to me they must know that some of their products are really crappy and thus don't put their company name anywhere on them. --Mike
  • I have an old 486 at home that has the same 500Mb restriction.

    I put 2 disks into it - a 330Mb (with Windows 95), and a 2Gb (with Red Hat 6.2). LILO is installed on the 330Mb master. The BIOS finds LILO, then LILO loads Windows or Linux. Works fine. It should work ok with a bigger slave disk too, as long as the /boot partition is in the first 1023 sectors, or whatever that limitation is.

  • First thing, as some others have pointed out, is to go to the MB manufacturer instead of going to award. My guess is that with a 500 meg limit, the best bios upgrade would be for 2 gigs, and if you are really lucky, 8 gigs. Highly unlikely that you will find any bios upgrade unless it's a pretty good brand name board.

    Second thing you could do is use a bios overlay. I used to know how these worked, but details are hazy. The jist was like this, the bios overlay would sit on the MBR of the drive, then when your bios recognized the drive and started to boot it, the overlay would over write the memory that contained the drive geometry. Or something like that.

    Or you could get a promise controller or similar PCI IDE controller. Unless this box is too old for PCI this is your best bet. I have a couple P55T2P4 Asus boards with over 100 gigs of drive space in them even though the bios only recognizes up to 30 gig.

    -Lou

  • This guy sells programmed BIOS chips (Score:3, Informative)

    by unitron ( 5733 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2002 @04:34AM (#3943025) Homepage Journal
    Congratulations on not feeding the landfill. To look into replacing the BIOS chip for about $20 go to http://www.tuxshield.com/BIOS_order.htm and use the email at the bottom of the page to contact the guy. This assumes that you don't have a flashable bios chip and replacement is the only way to go. Of course you could be like me and have an old Zeos 486 board that has a flashable bios but they went out of business before writing an updated bios that'll recognize anything over 528. Bummer.

    It sounds as though you're trying to load the Linux CDs on a big hard drive, hook that drive up to the computer temporarily and load Linux on the machine's hard drive from the bigger drive instead of from a CD-ROM drive which you say the machine doesn't have. Consider temporarily installing a CD drive from some other machine and installing from that or temporarily installing a NIC from some other machine and installing via network.

    If I can help you with hard drive questions, get in touch.

  • very useful site for finding bios and finding what motherboard you have.

  • BIOS overlays... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adolf ( 21054 ) <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 24, 2002 @04:45AM (#3943039) Journal
    As some other posters have pointed out, you don't need to have BIOS-level access to the entire hard drive to get the machine to boot properly and run Linux. Just keep the bootable partition within the first 500 megs, and all is dandy.

    However, you might want to use a BIOS overlay, anyway. Makes things easier, and lets you do stuff like run ancient DOS games on the hardware they were meant for, or fire up OS/2 Warp for an old-school look at the future.

    On my 386SL-25 laptop, I'm using IBM's overlay software, which is freely downloadable as a bootable floppy disk image. Most other manufacturers also supply overlay software, free, but it generally requires you to install it on a machine with a drive of the same make; Maxtor's software needs to see a Maxtor drive somewhere in the system, or it will simply refuse to cooperate.

    This works fine with Linux, and has for a very long time. It just recognizes that the drive was partitioned with overlay software, and does the same sector translation on its own.

    I doubt there's even a speed hit.

    I used IBM's software because I have a bunch of their SCSI disks in the machine I was borrowing to do the Linux install with, and Hitachi stands almost alone as a vendor who doesn't supply overlay software of their own. (the laptop, sadly, has no floppy drive, CD-ROM, or other external storage, so I spent most of an evening swapping IDE cables trying to get the thing to boot.)
  • I've got an old 386 with a 100 Mb HDD, which runs (ran) Windows 3.11.

    If I wanted to install linux on that box, what would be my best bet, as far as distros and teh mechanics of it (it's got a 3.5 floppy, but if I was serious about this I'd probably sptring for a NIC card).

    As importantly, what could I expect from a 386 linux box?

    Thanks.
  • Not unless you like toxic metals in your coffee. Even if it's legal in your locale, it's hardly good citizenship to throw computer hardware into a landfill. If it's beyond use, take it to a recycler. Yes it costs. So does treating cancer.
  • My old 486 wouldn't handle a drive > 512Meg (including CD-ROMS). So I bought an EIDE card. A quick check on Pricewatch for "ISA EIDE Card" shows that Promise still makes them. It'll be pretty slow (the ISA bus can only transfer like 7 or 8 Meg/sec.) If the machine has PCI, you can go that route. But if this is an old machine, you probably don't need a performance powerhouse anyway.

    My ISA card worked fine up to 8 Gig drives, but I would've needed a BIOS Overlay to use drives larger than 8 Gigs. YMMV.

    Although... PriceWatch shows the cards as costing about $34 w/ S&H, so I guess the cheaper option would be to buy the BIOS upgrade.
  • Chances are good that the vendor never updated the BIOS. Some of us remember the glory days when harddrive size had a BIOS limitation.

    You have two options:

    1) Buy a replacement BIOS ROM from someone like Mr. BIOS (yes, I said "Mr. BIOS")

    2) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). A DDO is a piece of software that is, in effect, a bootstrap virus. It loads code in the bootblock that builds a new drive map at boot time. While BIOS only seens four or five hundred megs, a DDO will get you to the next physical barrier (which, if I'm not mistaken is either 2GB or 4GB).

    DDOs were used successfully for a very long time, though I remember avoiding them at the time. They're creepy. Most HD vendors use to offer then for free (WD, Maxtor), you should be able to dig one up on an abandonware site.

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