Bill in Co wrote:
KenK wrote:
Shadow wrote in
:

On 2 Jan 2018 16:39:39 GMT, KenK wrote:

I have an old Compaq Presario 5000 running XP I got as a gift. It did
not include the XP install disk.
Specs ?

Download Speccy portable

https://www.piriform.com/speccy/builds

And tell us what it says.
RAM could be anything from 64MB to 1GB, CPU from a 600 Celeron
to a 1.6 Pentium ....
Video will also impact performance.
[]'s
My Computer sez:

Internal C - 133G
Internal D - 17G
Extenal G - 1 T

Oddly, My Computer in this system only provides drive info. System in
Control Panel sez:

Speed 1.59 GHz
512 MB RAM
XP Home Version 2002

I think if you added another 512 MB you'd be fine even with XP (with a 1.6
GHz CPU), and wouldn't have to go to Linux, unless you really wanted to (but
why?). I also found it curious that D: was only 17GB. I wonder why it's
that low (or maybe its just the partition size, and not a separate HD)?

C: and D: could be sharing a 160GB IDE drive (GiB versus GB etc).

When a person makes a selection like that, they may be attempting
to avoid the "137GB address rollover problem" on WinXP Gold and
so on. We went from 28 bit LBA to 48 bit LBA sometime around that
time. I went through that on Win2K SP2 and "carefully" selected
partition sizes for a whole year, without corrupting anything,
until it came time to update to SP4+Rollup1Ver2. Back in that
era, if you partitioned the entire 160GB drive as C: and it "spanned"
the magic 137GB dividing line, one write past the 137GB mark
on the large partition, and it would corrupt. And potentially
not be recoverable either. A partition can sit on either side of
the line, but it's not a good idea for a partition to straddle
the line. For partitions fully above the line, the OS knows it's
not supposed to touch them (Win2K SP2 wouldn't make a partition out
there, if you asked it to).

So that's why there's a lonesome 17GB partition sitting there.
It doesn't want any parts of its anatomy sliced off by the
28 bit LBA.

(The proposal to move from 28 bit to 48 bit...)

https://web.archive.org/web/20041024...l/e00101r6.pdf

Now, if you use a modern enough SP of Win2K or WinXP, you
no longer have to worry about that. If you installed WinXP SP3
from a CD you purchased last week, you can make the partitions
any size you want, including making joking references to
the (old) 28 bit limit.

Paul