resman
Veteran Member
I'm running a 32 GB HD in my 386/20e (actually 80 GB jumpered to look like 32 GB). I set the BIOS type to 49 - the largest supported by the Compaq BIOS, which shows up as a 640 MB drive. Using Compaq MSDOS 5.0, I was able to partition it and get it formated for DOS 5.0. Once that was done, I was able to create a second partition of the same size to install NT 3.51. I kept this to the same size as the DOS partition, but I may have been able to extend this up to 8 GB with an NTFS partition - I didn't try that. Note that this would extend past the end of the BIOS drive settings, but I was able to do it. Running ZipSlack (Slackware Linux on a ZIP drive), I was able to partition the rest of the drive for Linux swap and root partitions. Linux is new enough to interrogate the IDE drive for its actual parameters instead of relying on the BIOS settings. Linux now resides on the ~30GB partition, although it boots off the DOS partition with LOADLIN.
The trick to making it all work is keeping the active boot partition matched up to the BIOS HD type. Booting somewhat newer OSes, or a driver to allow access to the rest of the drive, is the way to go.
BTW, the 386/20e is my favorite PC of all. A style and build quality that remains unmatched, IMHO.
The trick to making it all work is keeping the active boot partition matched up to the BIOS HD type. Booting somewhat newer OSes, or a driver to allow access to the rest of the drive, is the way to go.
BTW, the 386/20e is my favorite PC of all. A style and build quality that remains unmatched, IMHO.