Addressing Drive-Capacity Limitations - Seagate Medalist 8421 Installation Manual

Medalist 8421, 6421, 4311 and 2112, Rev. A 11

Addressing drive-capacity limitations

Some DOS-based computers and operating systems are not
designed to accommodate large-capacity hard disc drives. The
most common system limitations are listed below.
528-Mbyte limit
The BIOS in some older computers cannot support drives with
capacities greater than 528 Mbytes. Seagate provides free Disk
Manager software with your drive to overcome this limitation.
Alternatively, you can purchase a hard drive controller or a BIOS
upgrade that supports drives with capacities greater than 528
Mbytes.
The 32-bit disk access feature in Windows 3.1 does not work
with drives that have capacities greater than 528 Mbytes. If you
want to use 32-bit disk access with Windows 3.1, see the file
SEG32BIT.TXT, located on your DiscWizard diskette, for further
information.
8.4-Gbtye limit
If your drive's capacity is greater than 8.4 Gbytes, the capacity
may exceed the limits of your system BIOS and operating sys-
tem. DOS and Windows operating systems and most system
BIOS limit the drive partitions to 8.4 Gbytes per physical drive.
Because of this limitation, a 32-bit file allocation table (FAT32) is
needed to support drive capacities greater than 8.4 Gbytes.
To achieve your drive's full capacity, you need a Windows operat-
ing system that supports FAT32 and device support for drive
capacities greater than 8.4 Gbytes, from one of the following: