"Ben Myers" wrote in message
...
William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!

My suspicion is that the Compaq SSF has a BIOS limit
of 132GB, another in the long parade of hard-coded
BIOS limitations this industry has seen, starting
with 528MB on 386/486 systems.

It seems inline with any other system of the time. A notable exception
is my Dell Precision Workstation 220 "toy". The 2002 A13 BIOS on that
machine has 48-bit LBA support...the BIOS can see and utilize all
200GB of the second installed hard disk. (Funny that my newer Latitude
D800 doesn't have 48-bit LBA support in the BIOS...)

I actually still have a couple of the Compaq P3 SSF
systems here.

I've come into probably seven now, and of those, at least two went out
after being refurbished and provided with XP Home. They're plenty good
enough for a "second computer" or something for kids to goof around
on.

I love the ones I have, although recently I've found the Evo D500, a
Pentium 4 Deskpro with a black/silver case and only minor internal
changes.

AFAIK, Compaq is the only name-brand mfr that imposed
on its hard drive vendors to limit the capacity of
a drive at the factory.

Interestingly, when I had my Contura 410C laptop, they kept sending it
back with bigger and bigger drives each time it smoked one. (It had a
tendency to blow up the Quantum Daytona 2.5" drives, so one day it
came back with a Seagate Marathon 420MB drive. That one blew up too,
so it came back with an IBM 720MB drive. The IBM drive survives today
in a PS/2 L40SX laptop.)

I guess they couldn't boss the 2.5" drive makers around in the same
way, or maybe they treated the machine differently because it was in
the hands of a "mere mortal" who didn't contract with them in any
special way.

I'm with you on Maxtors. Every so often, I gather out
5 or 6 and sell them quickly on eBay. I don't even
want to give them to my enemies.

Same here, although I have held on to a very few as they have worked
properly. I don't know what miracle is keeping them alive, and I
haven't checked too closely. Seagate Data Recovery Services (!!!) of
Canada actually bought a Maxtor drive from me on eBay...

I was curious, so I asked them why they wanted it. Amazingly enough,
they needed it for parts to recover a drive someone had sent them.

William

William,

Wow! Seagate Recovery Services bought a Maxtor from you! You mean there
is hope that I can get some reasonable dollars for the Maxtors that keep
piling up here? If you don't mind my asking, how much did you get and for
how much capacity? All the drive manufacturers offer data recovery
services, either directly or indirectly by brand-naming OnTrack data
recovery. This is a lucrative business, but it requires a clean room for
some classes of recovery involving drives with internal contamination from
head crashes and/or stuck heads. The few simple recoveries I have done
involve swapping PCBs from drive to drive when a failed drive simply won't
respond. But for the PCB swap to work, the firmware on the two PCBs has
to be absolutely identical. That's why some models of drives have decent
value to a drive recovery service.

The 2.5" drives back in the day of the Contura did not yet have the rich
ATAPI command set that includes being able to change the visible capacity.
The more complete ATAPI command set seems to have matured in the timeframe
of 6 to 10 GB 3.5" drives. Even so, there is still no consistency in the
use of SMART arributes, which are supposedly a manatory part of the ATAPI
standard.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend or Black Friday, depending on how you celebrate
it... Ben

Of note they can even rebuild physically broken/fragmented platters and
recover the data to some degree. It all depends on how important the data
is and what cost your willing to pay.