BL>   At present, I use a $20 IDE card running a 516Mb hard drive and the
 BL> 250Mb backup. My AWARD bios supports LBA and lists 4 drives (it only
 BL> finds two though). If I buy a big drive. I'll sell the 230Mb one and
 BL> use the 500M one as the backup. I'd like a CD too, which means I'll
 BL> have three drives, so I thought I'd buy a VLB card that does four
 BL> drives and stick the CD on its own cable.

 BL>   Will this work? Can I enable LBA and format the big-mutha that way,
 BL> but still use the 500Mb drive formatted as it is? Will the 500Mb
 BL> format LBA, or does that only work above 1024 heads?

afaik, if you go lba, you go the whole way, theoretically, if you have the
right number of heads and cylinders set on the drive, using lba shouldn't
matter, but some of the bios translations aren't perfect. there is no
reason why you couldn't use lba on a 20 meg drive, if you wish, but it only
becomes necessary above 500 megs. (well there are other solutions, but lba
is probably the cleanest.)


 BL>   I won't be using the CD much anyway, but I want two hard drives and
 BL> the CD. I can't do that on my $20 IDE card (can I?).

only if it has 2 ports, or you have 2 cards, and set the second one to the
secondary port adress.

                                        keith
@EOT:

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