langet@ecn-pc.UUCP (Timothy Lange) (04/03/86)
I have just finished installing a 32Mbyte winchester into my Zenith
Z-158 PC. This is an IBM compatible machine. I ordered my Zenith with
one floppy only and a 32Mbyte drive from Express Systems, they sent me a
Tulin brand disk. Took me an hour to install the disk, starting with
the removal of the cover. Took fifteen minutes just to remove the
plastic cover in front of the empty disk bay. All connections were plug
ins, the only switch that I changed was to tell the Zenith I had a hard
disk. It booted up on the hard disk, (disk was already formatted and
had PC-DOS 2.1 on it). I changed the partions from 1 at 32Mbytes to 3
partions, 1 at 10Mbytes and 2 at 11Mbytes. I did this so the cluster
size would be at 4K or 8 sectors. With DOS 2.xx, a 20Mbyte drive would
have cluster size of 8K and at 32Mbytes, the size would be 16K. As soon
as I get DOS 3.1 and reformat the disk with a new File Allocation Table,
I will treat the disk as one partion but with 2K cluster size.
So you can see that the size of the partion affects the size of the
cluster which is the minimum allocation of disk space. This is with DOS
2.xx though. With DOS 3.xx, the size of the File Allocation Table is
bigger so the cluster size can be smaller.
If anyone would like to ask questions I would be happy to try to answer,
I had a hard time finding answers to hard disk questions too. Now that
I feel I am in the know, I would like to share the wealth, so to speak.
--
Tim Lange Engineering Business Offices
317-494-5338 Rm 120 Engineering Administration Bldg.
Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907
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