laptop hard drive upgrade help

[Kaitlin Kaschak459]

ok so i have an old COMPAQ ARMADA 5200DM that my uncle gave me for free as an xmas gift because i love to tinker with old computers. it has a floppy drive a cd drive and a 3 gig HDD ide with windows 98se on it. he also gave me a few old ide hard dirves one is 20 gigs the other 2 are 40 gigs not sure if this pc has the older ide 8gig drive limitation any ideas on if a 20 or 40 gig ide HDD will work?

edit keep in mind the drives were given to me for free i just cant seemt o find out if the bios has the old hard drive gig size limit

 

[vesp3r]

I think the 20gigs one should work fine... to be sure you can first try to update bios

 

[JWoody]

If im not mistaken the limitation is within whatever OS your using, if the OS you use supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS or any of the Linux File systems the 8GB limit will not be present, the 8GB limit was a FAT16 limitation and hasnt been used since windows 95 OSR2. so you can stick about any IDE (or with an SATA PCI card) drive in it and you should be fine (With the acception of GPT witch isnt a software/OS feature, but a EUFI feature), and to note that machine wouldnt make a bad basic web surnfing/music streaming box, or file server with the right OS.

 

[Kaitlin Kaschak459]

If im not mistaken the limitation is within whatever OS your using, if the OS you use supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS or any of the Linux File systems the 8GB limit will not be present, the 8GB limit was a FAT16 limitation and hasnt been used since windows 95 OSR2. so you can stick about any IDE (or with an SATA PCI card) drive in it and you should be fine (With the acception of GPT witch isnt a software/OS feature, but a EUFI feature), and to note that machine wouldnt make a bad basic web surnfing/music streaming box, or file server with the right OS.

i got windows 98se on it as from my research thats the os that came on it when u bought it new back in the 90's