DON'T PANIC! PC Help presents

LARGE IDE HARD DRIVE FACTS & FAQS
by DJ Elliott
Copyright 1995 by DJ Elliott

Part of Understanding the IBM Compatible (formerly Build Your Own), available for $8 (copying, 
S&H) from
DJ Elliott
1 G Lakeridge Pl
Cockeysville, MD 21030

DISCLAIMERS
These FACTS and FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS are guides to dealing with installation of 
hard drives. The author makes no claim that you are capable of doing so, and does not 
encourage you to try anything that may cause damage to hardware, software or data. The author 
assumes no responsiblility for errors or omissions in this text or failed attempts or losses by users 
using this material. If you need help, get it!

All products mentioned are copyright their respective companies, and the companies and 
products  are Trademarked. Review of their product constitutes and/or implies no relationship 
and no infringement is intended.

Dedicated to the memory of Farnum Andrew Quillimork, who invented FAQs.

THE WHAT OF IT
Hoo-boy. This can be tough, and it shouldn't be. I'm going to cut through all the horse hockey 
and give you the straight scoop on large hard drives, hopefully BEFORE you run up against it.

THE WHY OF IT
DOS is limited to 540 Megabytes in a hard drive partition. They never imagined you would need 
more. 1024 Cylinders is the most you can specify. With half the planet wanting to put in at least 
an 820 Meg Drive, the Industry had to come up with a workaround. So they did. They ALL came 
up with workarounds, and therby lies the rub. You buy a new Hard Drive, and maybe a new, 
"Super IDE" controller (I've yet to find one that works better than a normal IDE card for the hard 
drive part, and there are a lot of bad 16550 UARTs [COM port drivers] according to Industry 
sources), and you go to install - The Motherboard says, "Turn this stuff on in the BIOS", the 
Controller says "Throw these jumpers" and the Hard drive says "Use this Utility Disk." You soon 
find out that turning all three on leads to disaster. Just to make it more fun, different Hard Drive 
manufacturers and controller companies and BIOS makers have DIFFERENT schemes. So what 
do you do when a Western Digital Caviar is on C: and a Maxtor is on D:? And I guess you expect 
an answer...

THE HOW OF IT
As usual in this business, keep the solution simple and elegant. Don't make an OS/2 out of it. 
Look at the overall system you are going to end up with, and take the shortest distance between 
the two points. Play around with getting fancy later. Let's say you are going to end up with a 850 
Caviar (TM) drive on C: and your old hard Drive on D:. Your old stuff will be transfered to C:.

First, prepare your old system. Do the following in order.

Upgrade to DOS 6.22.

Scan the existing drive, including all partitions and compressed mounted drives. Defrag all of 
them. Dump any temporary files and remove any cross allocation "phantom directories". That's 
those directories with names like TBLCH!@.&^%. You CAN get rid of these even though you get 
Access Denied or Directory not empty errors. How? Send me $10 in a self addressed... nah. 
Here goes. Your key is a cool little DOS utility called DELTREE. Go to the root of the drive and 
first attempt to RENAME the directory -

RENAME TBLCH!@.&^% DUMPIT

If you get Access Denied, run ATTRIB and remove any attributes.

ATTRIB TBLCH!@.&^% -r -a -s -h

If the directory contains any weird characters like smiley faces, go into super nerd high gear. You 
can RENAME these characters using the ALT key and the numeric keypad. Get a list of the 
ASCII codes from the back of a DOS book, or hunt and peck them yourself. Say the character is 
the paragraph symbol (a backward p). You would hold down the right ALT key and type 020 on 
the numeric keypad. Let go. Wow! There it is! You can use that symbol in a RENAME or 
DELTREE command. You may need to load ANSI.SYS depending on your machine. RENAME 
the file/directory name to something normal. Once you have the phantom directory renamed to 
something normal, DELTREE it. This does the amazing feat of removing all unaccessible sub-
directories and files under it.Cool, huh?

DELTREE DUMPIT

DELTREE is a powerful command. Don't misuse it. If you do, special agents of Geek 
International will hunt you down and kill you. Scan and defrag again. Now that the drives, 
partitions and compressed volumes are cleaned up, move any information in partitions to the 
root partition, go into FDISK and remove any logical drives, leaving the empty partitions. Careful 
here! Read up on it if you need to. You want all your files in one big C: drive. Leave extra space 
unallocated. Next uncompress all compressed volumes, whether DBLSPACE or DRVSPACE or 
STACKER (TM) or whatever. ZIP directories to disk as necessary to make room. Remove 
DBLSPACE and DRVSPACE to get rid of .INI files (removing these in DOS parlance doesn't 
mean deleting the files, just removing the .INI files and such.) Disable CD ROM drives by 
REMming out entries in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Dump any references to 
STACKER or D*SPACE in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT with REM statements. Once you 
have one big, clean partition you are ready to move on. Do not continue until nothing is left but 
C: at reboot. Defrag once more.

Make a system disk. I repeat, make a system disk. (FORMAT A: /S). If you want to be really 
cool, next XCOPY the hard drive utility disk to this system disk (as your legal backup copy). 
What Utility Disk??!??. Uh-oh. Read on.

Back up if you need to - at least backup your DATA files to disk.

UPGRADING AN IDE TO AN IDE
Contrary to what you would think would be logical, first install the new Hard Drive as C:. You 
MUST do this, or it will be prepared as not bootable by the disk utility.Trust me. I learned the 
hard way.Go into the BIOS (AMI - Press <DEL>, Packard Bell and Acer may be <CTRL_ALT> 
<ESC>, etc) and WRITE DOWN THE PARAMETERS OF THE EXISTING HARD DRIVE. 
Remove the old hard drive by (turn it off first) disconnecting the flat gray controller cable. Note 
that the cable has a red stripe on one side. This indicates Pin 1. Remove the four prong power 
cable. Remove the drive and mark the parameters on the drive top with a Magic Marker (TM 
somebody or other, I'm sure) and place the drive somewhere safe, like in a small bag and put it 
in a drawer. Don't set it down next to the dog's water bowl. Touch something metal to discharge 
static and then remove the new hard drive from the bag. The instructions with the drive, if there 
are any, will tell you how to set it for "Master". Since the dealer didn't give you the manual or the 
disk, at this point put everything away safely, get in your car, go back to the dealer and demand 
the disk and the manual. He will eventually succumb and give you a xerox copy and a disk copy 
of the utility disk. They usually only get one per box of drives. Drive back home and get back to 
where we were. Don't you wish you had read this first? One manufacturer's drive has jumpers 
MR for Master, SL for Slave, and CS for Connect here if you are Stupid. Choose Master for the 
first (C:) hard drive you are installing. Now the fun part. You must figure out how to set the old 
drive for Slave. Many drives do have a separate jumper setting for one-drive-only, just to 
confuse matters more. When you are confident that the new hard drive is Master (C: or Drive 0) 
and the old hard drive is Slave (D: or Drive 1), move on. If you are going to hunt and peck your 
way around, start by marking down the original positions of the jumpers. Duh. Connect the new 
hard drive with the end of the gray cable, Pin 1 to Pin 1. Look closely at the hard drive to find the 
"1". Hook up the power connector. There should be a second connector in the middle of the gray 
cable. Hook your old hard drive here and find a power connector for it. If you find that the IDE 
Cable only has one connector and/or there is no spare power connector, get back in you car, 
drive back to the dealer and buy a two connector IDE cable and/or a "Y" connector for the power 
connector. By the way, never connect a power connector with the power on. Don't fry your brand 
new hard drive.Turn on the machine. If the hard drive light comes on as soon as you turn on the 
machine and you get "Hard Drive Controller Failure" no matter what you do you most likely have 
the cable backwards. Your original installer may also have put the cable itself on backwards. Get 
Pin 1 to Pin 1 all around. When you start back up, the Motherboard may hang after the memory 
check. This is normal. Wait it out. The older the Motherboard, the longer the wait.You will get a 
friendly message like :Drive C: Failure, Drive D: failure.Get back into the BIOS. If you have a 
fairly recent Motherboard, your BIOS will have a wonderful option called AUTO DETECT IDE 
DRIVES. Let's assume it has this sweet utility and you can have two User specified settings. Run 
detect on Drive 0 and Drive 1. If it finds both, you are doing great. If it doesn't, you have some 
cable and jumper work to do. If it recognizes drive 0 and not drive 1, you may be running an old 
Disk Manager or some such which over-rides the BIOS and you are going to have to read the 
section below and do it the hard way, or you do not have the old drive set correctly for Slave, OR 
the second hard drive is so old it is hopelessly confused.

If AUTO DETECT IDE HARD DRIVES is not a BIOS option, you must specify at least the 
Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per track in the User Settings entry at the end of the hard drive 
table. If User Settings aren't allowed in your BIOS, get a life and go get a Motherboard dated 
1990 or later. Sheesh. Most new drives have Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per Track listed on 
the top of the drive. If not, and you don't have a manual, you can use one of many shareware 
and freeware utilities available online to query the geometry from the drive, or get a book or look 
in a book in the library. You must have these numbers, unless you are using a hard disk 
installation utility which masks all this stuff. That's nice for today, but you really should 
understand the process on some level. Maybe you don't care.. 

With MFM/RLL drives, the actual geometry had to be specified - with IDE, it is only necessary to 
specify the Megebyte total, which is calculated as CYLINDERS x HEADS x SECTORS PER 
TRACK (x 512 bytes per sector). When the BIOS goes out to query the drive for readiness, the 
actual geometry is reported by the drive to the BIOS. As long as the BIOS can get to this 
information (and it is valid), the drive will initialize. Driver manufacturers use this query to end 
around DOS and bypass the limitations. The limitations are 1024 Cylinders, 16 Heads and 64 
Sectors per Track (times 512 bytes per sector equals 536M).

WHAT ARE THOSE OTHER PARAMETERS?
Write Precompensation, Skew, Landing Zone, etc. are important to MFM/RLL drives, but usually 
not to IDE. Set Write Precompensation to 65535 and the Landing Zone to one cylinder higher 
than the number of Cylinders Specified. Leave other values at 0. Your Disk Utility may change 
these numbers. If they do, leave them alone.

Some machines only have one User definable setting. It may still be possible to have the Utility 
Disk set these up by overriding the BIOS. It may be messy. I can't cover all possible scenarios.

BAD SECTORS
IDE drives usually don't have bad sectors. If you get a drive that was used in an OS/2 system, 
you may need to low level format it; you must find an IDE low level formatter that recognizes 
your drive type. DO NOT USE an MFM/RLL low level formatter - it will destroy the factory 
parameters and turn it into a smaller, slower hard drive. You may need to run the low level 
formatter two or three times to completely get rid of  OS/2 left behinds - they can show up as  
bad sectors to the formatter. Three times usually does it. If the low level formatting immediately 
starts counting off bad sectors, stop it and remove any other hard drive in the system. I don't 
know why, but sometimes you have to.

There are two kinds of bad sectors - hard and soft. Soft occurs when the formatter is unable to 
initialize a sector because of a random peice of dust in the drive or a hard to erase bit of data, 
like an OS/2 boot sector. You can usually format away soft errors with persistance. Bad Hard 
sectors are defects on the platters themselves, usually on the inner tracks, and are there to stay. 
Mapping out bad sectors will make the drive work, but be aware that when you move the drive to 
another system, you may have a hell of a time because the geometry of the mapped out drive - 
say 1009 x 16 x 64 - is different than the geometry in the BIOS settings and the original 
geometry that may be used by the setup utility, which may take the Cylinders, Heads and SPT 
from a table based on the hard drives model. You may need to low level format, including 
generating a new map to get it to work in another system. This stuff is made to be set up once 
and used till it dies. Many of the early IDE hard drives develop bad tracks near the end of the 
drive. A trick I have used to get these drives working is to make a small parition at the end of the 
drive with FDISK - say the last two Meg - and leave them without a logical drive assignment. 
High level formatting then succeeds.

THE FIRST REBOOT - A PLANNED FAILURE
When you get to the point where both drives are recognized, save into the BIOS and reboot with 
the SYSTEM DISKETTE floppy. If you didn't make a system diskette, you are **cked.  I warned 
you. Reinstall the old hard drive and start over. You may need to go into the BIOS and enable 
BOOT FROM FLOPPY. Probably not. On reboot with the SYSTEM DISKETTE, You will get 
another error message along the lines of Drive C: Failure, Drive D: Failure or CMOS options not 
set. This is normal. Place your Utility diskette in the drive and start your Disk program. With Disk 
Manager (Copyright and Trademark Ontrack), type DM/m. The /m parameter gives you more 
control over what happens. If you live right, both drives will be detected, and the only preparation 
necessary is to allocate one big partition on Drive 0 and high level format. DO NOT LOW LEVEL 
FORMAT. To be absolutely safe, disconnect the gray cable from the second hard drive just 
before you partition or format the new drive, in the unlikely event you are specifying the wrong 
drive. After the partition and high level format (this may be masked by user friendly (?) schemes 
by some disk utilities), reconnect the second hard drive. Do not do anything to Drive 1. Disk 
Manager (TM) or your disk utility will write special start up files to the new drive to do an end run 
around DOS. Imagine a big, stupid guard standing in a doorway. It is $50 to get in for adults, $15 
for children under 12. When he asks you how old you are, say 11 even if you are 99. He'll let you 
pass for $15. That's how this works. "How big are you?" asks DOS. "540 Meg" answers the 1.2 
Gig Hard Drive at every boot up. "Duh, OK" says DOS thoughtfully.DOS never thinks to ask the 
BIOS, which in most cases reports the true geometry, or, if it runs out of User Setting entries, a 
fake entry. Don't flip out if your new drive ends up set up as 30 Meg. If it works, it works. The 
BIOS is what checks the hard drive for geometry validity, and it is the hard drive utility's job to 
handle this.

WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Okay, so who is going to control the Enhanced IDE settings of my hard drive? The hard drive 
itself!!! If you give control to the BIOS or the controller, you are giving control to a device that 
does not know what the hard drive will expect, but the hard drive always will. Set the BIOS to 
disable 32 bit access, large hard drive partion, LBA, etc, and only turn them on as last resort. 
Some machines, such as some Gateway 2000s (TM) need LBA turned ON. LBA is Logical Block 
Addressing. Don't use it if you don't need it to get the drive running. A few machines, including 
some 486 PS/2's, won't work at all with partitions bigger than 540 Meg. Other operating systems, 
such as OS/2 and some flavors of UNIX may need special setup or may not be able to run 
partitions larger than 540.

Leave the Controller set for normal hard drive and play with Super Speed access or whatever 
later. Ignore the Utility disk that comes with the controller unless you are installing a third and 
fourth hard drive. Although it is logical to tell the BIOS you have a large hard drive and the 
controller the same, the reality is that you ONLY NEED TO TURN IT ON ONCE. If you tell two or 
three devices to enable large drives, they will fight each other merrily, with you losing. Same with 
32 bit access. The 32 bit access driver which comes with Windows does not work with large hard 
drives. The newer BIOS, newer Controller card and large hard drive all come with replacement 
drivers for Windows 32 bit access. Use the hard drive's utility again. Only it knows what works 
with the drive. Logical, right?

WHAT IF I CAN"T GET THE OLD HARD DRIVE TO ACT AS SLAVE?
I was afraid you would ask. Messy, but possible.Still begin by setting up the new hard drive as 
C:. You have to. You have no choice. If you don't it will never boot. Since the new hard drive is 
faster and will hopefully outlive the old hard drive, you want it as the boot device. Once you have 
the new hard drive working correctly as C:, remove it and re-install the old hard drive as 
C:,(change the BIOS) the new hard drive as D:. Follow the steps below to transfer the files, then 
remove the old hard drive, and replace it with the new hard drive. This works most of the time. 
Do not erase the old hard drive! Resetting the new hard drive as C: rarely but occasionally fails, 
necessitating a re-partioning, putting you back to square one. Sorry. Sometimes it is just 
impossible to set these drives up easily. You may end up doing a back up and restore no matter 
what you try.

WHAT IF NOTHING WORKS BUT ONE DRIVE AT A TIME?
You probably have a very old IDE drive as the original. You have three choices:

1) Back up to disk or Zip to disk
2) Back up to tape or
3) Take the machine over to a friend's house, and stop at the dealer (oh, no, again?) and buy a 
null modem cable (Laplink (TM) cable). Make sure you also buy any 25pin to 9pin converters you 
need, which means you must determine whether the open COM port you are going to use on 
both machines are 25 or 9 pins. Convince the friend that you are competent enough to install 
one of your hard drives in his machine, and that you can put it back together so that he can still 
play tetris tonight. Install one hard drive in his machine (assuming he/she has an existing IDE 
controller), have the other working in yours, type HELP INTERSVR at the DOS prompt and use 
DOS 6.22's built in machine to machine transfer utility. Get your freinds machine back to normal, 
and get the hell out of there before he starts Tetris.

MOVING FROM MFM/RLL DRIVES TO IDE.
If you have two flat cables (a fat and a skinny) plus a power connector running from your old 
hard drive, you have an MFM or RLL drive installed. My sympathies. Back up to disk or tape, 
remove the old hard drive AND controller, put in an IDE controller (actually, it's not a controller, 
just the card to handle the controller on the IDE drive itself. That's why it's called IMBEDDED 
DRIVE ELECTRONICS.) and install the new drive. Consider COM port and LPT port changes 
this causes. If your Modem is on COM 2, you have to change COM 2 on the IDE card to COM 4. 
But thats another book.

DELETING OLD PROGRAMS
Yep, I agree. Get rid of some of that old stuff before you go through this process. But watch out if 
you are a heavy Windows user. Windows programs install DLL files and VBX files and fonts and 
all kinds of stuff to your Windows and WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectories. Blow the 30 bucks 
and buy an uninstaller. Always remove Windows programs with an uninstaller. There is no other 
way to tell what DLLs are used by what Windows program, unless you are a total dweeb and 
actually LIKE doing hex dumps till 3 am. Windows 95 has a hidden utility called RunDLL that 
allows you to run a DLL like an EXE to see what it does.

DRIVE SPEEDER UPPERS
Most "high speed" IDE controllers and new hard drives come with speed 'em up schemes to 
make your hard drive go faster. I'm not going to tell you not to play with them, but DON'T use 
them until your hard drive has been working for a good week. Especially if you leave an old hard 
drive in the machine, and run the speeder upper against that. I'm sure most of them work fine 
most of the time. but I've had to low level format a couple of drives after three days of high 
speed operation, and I've lost a work hard drive's data to cross allocations (before I knew the 
DELTREE trick). SCANDISK is a good way to find out if the speeder upper is going to trash your 
drive ( if, indeed, it trashes your drive, you now know. This is tough love stuff). Whatever drive 
speeder you choose to mess with, use the Advanced Options to thoroughly test the best settings 
for it. One particular make has a quick check option. If you run the quick install it may actually 
slow your drive down. There are three 'most popular' speed up schemes:

1) 32 bit access under Windows (TM), Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (TM) and Windows '95 
(TM). With the aforementioned codicil of replacing the driver with 540+ drives, this is a very 
stable utility which works with all but some some real old programs.

2) A new technology in most new IDE hard drives is called MBS (Multiple Block Size) or read-
and-write-multiple mode.

3) An older hard drive may be able to use a scheme where a utility will install a device driver to 
execute I/O (In/Out) requests in RAM rather than the norm, which is BIOS calls (much slower). 
Your BIOS may offer Shadow RAM, which is an older technology alternative. To use device 
driver RAM I/O, you have to disable Shadow RAM. Test both for speed

SO HOW DO I KNOW IF MY HARD DRIVE IS QUICKER?
We sometimes (or at least I) wonder when all is said and done if the system really ended up any 
quicker. You can download Benchmarks till you are blue in the modem, but many benchmarks, 
especially those touting a particular product, make end runs around the BIOS and sometimes 
even hard code information the system will look for (especially in Video Benchmarking) in the 
Hardware Device! I say the proof is on my wrist. When all is said and done, when the high speed 
drive is installed, the speeder upper is running, the controller is set to use higher data rates, the 
BIOS is at 0 wait state, and the VESA Local bus Video Card with Windows Accelerator is 
installed, all I care about is the WIN test. It's a moronic little test that anyone can do. Before you 
make any changes to your system, take off your watch, go to a DOS prompt and type WIN. Mark 
the number of seconds till the Hour Glass is replaced by the pointer. Make your changes. 
Repeat. Tweak your changes. Repeat. Try different combinations. Repeat. Doesn't it all come 
down to how long it takes to load Windows and Windows programs? Who cares if the data rate is 
10 times faster if the CPU is slugging along and backed up to next tuesday, or all your wait 
states are 2 and your external cache is turned off in the BIOS? Be results oriented, and don't 
worry about Benchmarks. If you play DOOM all day or run CAD all day, time them instead.

SO WHY DOES MY HARD DRIVE END UP WITH LESS MEGABYTES THAN THE DRIVE IS 
SUPPOSED TO HAVE?
The Driver manufacturer is using Binary Millions (1,024,000) and the operating system and 
software are using Decimal Millions (1,000,000). See this effect most clearly by running 
MEM/C|MORE from the DOS prompt. Notice the numbers on the lines versus the numbers in 
parenthesis. 

(DOS 6.22 is a registered product of Microsoft Corporation)

Modules using memory below 1 MB:

  Name           Total       =   Conventional   +   Upper Memory
  --------  ----------------   ----------------   ----------------
  MSDOS       	65,901   (64K)     65,901   (64K)          0    (0K)
  HIMEM        	 3,744    (4K)      3,744    (4K)          0    (0K)
  EMM386       	 3,120    (3K)      3,120    (3K)          0    (0K)
  COMMAND      4,992    (5K)      4,992    (5K)          0    (0K)
  win386      	12,304   (12K)     12,304   (12K)          0    (0K)
  SMARTDRV    25,632   (25K)     25,632   (25K)          0    (0K)
  POWER       	13,840   (14K)     13,840   (14K)          0    (0K)
  DOSKEY      	 4,144    (4K)      4,144    (4K)          0    (0K)
  WIN          	 1,520    (1K)      1,520    (1K)          0    (0K)
  COMMAND  	 3,088    (3K)      3,088    (3K)          0    (0K)
  Free             516,944  (505K)    516,944  (505K)          0    (0K)

WHEN MY DRIVE STARTS TO FILL UP, SPACE DISAPPEARS!
The larger the hard drive, the more "slack space" is generated. Each bit of data takes a bigger 
chunk of bytes, which becomes significant as the drive size grows. This is a hard drive fact of 
life. Sorry. It's my fault. I admit it.

The second reason is that if you are DBLSPACEd, DRIVSPACEd or STACKed (TM Stac 
Electronics), the amount of free space is ESTIMATED based on the compression ratio it expects 
to acheive. If you are filling the drive with text files, you will get more than you expect. If, 
however, you clutter your drive with graphics (GIFs, BMPs, etc) and ZIP files, these files are 
unable to compress via the compression program or, in the case of ZIPS, already compressed. 
One of the dumbest things you can do is to spend an evening zipping stuff on your compressed 
drive to make room. I know. I've done it. (Everybody together: Duh.)
 
Here's a warning you should never, ever, ever forget. Send me $5 just for telling you. Never, 
ever, ever let a compressed drive fall below 10 Meg free. Hideous data and partition destroying 
things can happen, especially if your TEMP directory is set to a compressed volume or your 
Windows Swap File is temporary and set to a compressed drive. Set your TEMP directory to the 
uncompressed volume and allow 10 Meg free space at all times on that volume. 

SET TEMP=D:\TEMP

Create this directory on D: (or whatever the uncompressed host is) and put the line in 
AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Use a Permanant Swap file on the uncompressed drive. This goes for Windows '95, too! All 
programs don't use the SET TEMP variable, and may choose their own place for temporary files, 
usually it's own sub-directory. Don't let it run out of space while creating temporary files. It's 
brutal. It's worse than a traffic accident.

LOCK UPS AND 32 BIT FAILURES
If you get everything tweaked and the system starts locking up on you, you've done a little TOO 
good of a job. Something in the system is running faster than the CPU can keep up with (or vice 
versa), and Interupts are getting clobbered. Back off a little, including using these handy little 
tips:

1) Try removing HIGHSCAN if present in your EMM386 line

2) If you are on a Network, wake up the Supervisor and ask him what X= statements are needed 
in the EMM386 line for your network hardware card.

3) Back off the wait states in the BIOS from 0 to 1, or 1 to 2, especially if you have slower speed 
SIMMS

4) If you have non-parity SIMMS, see if your BIOS lets you specify NON-PARITY.

5) You still haven't dumped that EGA Monitor?

6) 32 Bit access may fail under quite a few conditions
	-Another Virtual Device Driver *.vxd in SYSTEM.INI. REM them one by one.
	-QEMM stealth is using an "M" switch instead of an "m" switch.

7) I am singularly unimpressed with Vesa Local Bus. If you have Vesa Local Bus cards and you 
get weird lockups, your Motherboard manual may tell you about a jumper than will change the 
Vesa Wait State from 0 to 1.

There are other considerations, especially in getting Windows for Workgroups 3.11 to work with 
both 32 bit file access and 32 bit disk access.

7) If you get lockups when starting Windows along with occasional EMM386 errors, you have 
both the BIOS and DOS=UMB competing for an area between 640K and 1 Meg RAM. Exclude 
the UMB in your EMM386 line, and if that solves your problem, start backing the exclude down. 
For example:

device=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=A000-FFFF

If that works, narrow it

device=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=A000-EFFF

Memory is counted in hexidecimal - the ranges are

A000-AFFF (Usually VIDEO)
B000-BFFF (Usually VIDEO)
C000-DFFF (Usually free)
E000-FFFF (Some portion of this will be used by BIOS ROM routines and shadowing)

C800-DFFF is the safest range, but is not much fun.

Reboot your system and press F5 when you see Starting MS-DOS... (If you don't see starting 
MS-DOS, get upgraded, you old fart.) This forces a clean boot. Go to the WINDOWS 
subdirectory and run MSD.EXE. The three Memory Utilities will map out what areas of Upper 
Memory are being used by the BIOS and the VIDEO. These are the areas you want excluded.

Continue to narrow the range until the smallest exclusion possible has been isolated, e.g

device=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE noems X=E800-F800

Western Digital (TM) also says that UNDELETE causes problems by using Int 26h.

ENABLING SECONDARY IDE FOR THE THIRD AND FOURTH DRIVE
Here's where the game has different rules. Since the IDE controller is what is providng the 
Secondary IDE, you want to give control of it to the controller. Get the first two drives working 
flawlessly before attempting the third drive. A utility should have come with the IDE controller 
which loads a device in CONFIG.SYS to enable the third and fourth drives. Use it. You will 
probably be instructed NOT to set them up in the BIOS.

Here is a section from a readme by our friends from foreign lands. Since they don't list an 
address or phone number anywhere on the box or inside, they won't mind me quoting their read 
me:

"MORE THAN TWO DISK DRIVES
    1. WBIDE.EXE supports up to four IDE disks access capability.
       Two are 1FXH port and another two are 17XH port.
[NOTE]: The 1FXH port connector must be attached at least one disk,
	before you attached any disks into 17XH port connector.

       If any IDE disk is attached into 17XH port connector, we strongerly
       suggest you to execute WBIDE.EXE with first way, a device driver on DOS.
       There is the only way to access the logical drives on 17XH port IDE disks
       under DOS, such as C:, D:, E: and so on.
[NOTE]: The IDE disks, where are attached into 17XH port connector,
	do not specify cyl/hd/sect parameters in ROM BIOS SETUP."

Doesn't that give you a headache?

FINALLY, THE KUDOS
Many reading sources were used while learning how to deal with larger hard drives, and while no 
material was drawn directly from the sources in an attempt to use copyrighted work (with the 
exception of the IDE Controller readme), I gratefully acknowledge the expert help files, readme 
files and manuals of the good folks at Seagate, Conner and especially Western Digital, all 
Trademark their respective companies.

One final tidbit. Make sure you are running SMARTDRV (with 256 if you only have 4 Meg RAM) 
and load the CDROM device driver BEFORE SMARTDRV.

Konbanwa and Domo Arigato.

DJ
