I have an AMD K6 400 MHz Windows 98 system running on a gigabyte GA-5AA board and 196 MB RAM. Recently the old hard drive, a Quantum Fireball 3.5 series 6 GB, went belly up (sounded like someone was playing marbles in there). I replaced the hard drive with a Maxtor 20 GB HDD (model# 2B020H1) which the motherboard CMOS recognised when using the auto detect HDD feature. The CMOS reported the size correctly but, on closer inspection, appeared to misreport the number of cylinders. The CMOS reported the drive had 39,535 cylinders which is more than the correct number of cylinders (38,792 - written on the physical drive). The Maxtor site instruction is to either use auto detect or manually type in the drive parameters in CMOS setup. Windows 98 installed fine as did Office 97, and the system seems stable so far. If I go into CMOS and manually type in 38,792 cylinders (which I found on the Maxtor website) and save this parameter, the system is fine and the disc size is still correct (just over 20 GB). Do you know if the misrepresentation of cylinders is going to come back and bite me in the rear some day? Do you recommend sticking with the auto detect settings or manually typing in the number of cylinders?

Thank you for letting me know the model number of your hard drive as it made my job quite a bit easier! This allowed me to find the Maxtor technical specifications for your hard drive as described at www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/diamondmaxVL/QuickSpecs/42091.htm. You will notice that there are two cylinder numbers for your hard drive - actual cylinders and max cylinders. As your hard drive is over 8.4 GB (which is a capacity barrier boundary - I will comment on this later) you should in fact put the max cylinders as the setting in your CMOS. You will see in a footnote that you should never enter a value greater than 16,383 for the cylinders as this could cause data loss. Maxtor would be much more knowledgeable on this topic than me (as they actually made your hard drive) so this is probably good advice to adhere to (in order to avoid being bitten in the rear later on…). So, now you are probably wondering what is a capacity barrier boundary? Believe me, it is a big concept to grasp, which is why I can’t explain it here. However, have a look at the following whitepaper on the issue written by Maxtor: www.maxtor.com/technology/whitepapers/63001.html. This is an excellent explanation of the capacity barrier boundary concept that is well worth a read.