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10 Barracuda ATA Family Installation Guide, Rev. A
Addressing drive-capacity limitations
Some DOS-based computers and operating systems are not
designed to accommodate large-capacity hard disc drives. The
most common system limitations are listed below.
528-Mbyte limit
The BIOS in some older computers cannot support drives with
capacities greater than 528 Mbytes. Seagate provides free Disk
Manager software with your drive to overcome this limitation.
Alternatively, you can purchase a hard drive controller or a BIOS
upgrade that supports drives with capacities greater than 528
Mbytes.
8.4-Gbyte limit
If your drive’s capacity is greater than 8.4 Gbytes, the capacity
may exceed the limits of your system BIOS and operating sys-
tem. DOS and Windows operating systems and most system
BIOS limit the drive partitions to 8.4 Gbytes per physical drive.
Because of this limitation, a 32-bit file allocation table (FAT32) is
needed to support drive capacities greater than 8.4 Gbytes.
To achieve your drive’s full capacity, you need a Windows operat-
ing system that supports FAT32
and
device support for drive
capacities greater than 8.4 Gbytes, from one of the following:
•
Third-party device driver, such as Disk Manager (Disk Man-
ager is provided on the DiscWizard diskette or CD included
with your drive),
or
•
An intelligent ATA host adapter,
or
•
A system BIOS upgrade