bios and HDD incompatibility!!!

[mymandarin123]

i had brought a 40gb seagate drive(earlier i had a samsung 4.3 GBHDD) few months back but it was when i installed the drive that i came to know my bios didn't support it.
cpu: PII 333Mhz
mobo manufaturer:pcpartner
MODEL:VIB862D
CHIPSET:VIA APOLLO pro
CHIPSET PART NUMBER:
SOUTH BRIDGE:VT82C586B
NORTH BRIDGE:VT82C691
PLATFORM:SLOT 1 BABY AT
FLASH IC SIZE: 1 Mbit
reply from my mobo manufaturer was "the mobo with 1Mb flash BIOS can only recognise drives upto 32 Gb."
since i didn't have much money that time i used the seagate Dynamic Drive Overlay S/W to somehow make the HDD work but it caused me lot of reliability problems.

i just want to make the 40GB HDD work perfectly .
i know my sys is obsolete but apart from the bios problem i have no othe problems with my sys.

which of these update options u think will ******cost me less*** but will still address my problem?

1.buying the promise ultra 100 card(non raid version) (manufacturer claims that onboard bios can overcome any bios limitation and boost the transfer speed of HDD.)
2.buy a new P2 slot 1 motherboard (are they available ?) with bios support for larger HDD.
(if any brands are available can u just name a few good ones)
any better options ??? please suggest me..

[Darthtanion]

Is it possible that the motherboard can't read a single partition of over 32GB?

Just thinking out loud here, but before you go out and spend more money on a system that will eventually be replaced, you might want to try to partition your new hard drive into two or three separate partitions and fool the BIOS into thinking that there is more than one drive in the system.

Don't know if it will work, but it may be worth a shot. But the down side to this method is that you will be limited to the max speed supported by the motherboard itself. The Add-on card would be better suited for you if the speed is an issue.

[Beefy]

just in regards to what you said darth, the BIOS doesn't actually pay attention to logical drives, does it? I'm fairly sure that it only looks at what physical drives are connected, then the OS looks at what partitioning there is...

[Darthtanion]

Could very well be. I was just thinking out loud there. It's been a LONG time since I have had a motherboard with this sort of hardware limitation. ;)

[Andy]

i'm not sure about your drive, correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure IBM drives have special jumper configurations to make them compatable with older bios's, your drive might have special jumper settings too

[Albinus]

The Promise ATA controller seems to be your best bet, my mother had a similar problem with her 20GB drive - she put it in and the BIOS got grumpy when dealing with drives over 13GB

Luckily for her there was a BIOS update, but in your case you're SOL I'm afraid :(

Shop around for the Promise card - should be able to pick one up for around A$100 (US$50)

[robertku]

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

Hope this might solve your problem without having to spend any money unnecessarily.


Cheers for now.

[Orestis]

If the BIOS doesn't support the disk's size, you have to go with a disk manager software. I had this problem once and I used the Ontrack disk manager, back in '96.

You should go for the promise IDE controller. They have onboard BIOSes which support large disk capacities and your normal motherboard BIOS has nothing to do with them. Thus, you can get read of your disk overlay manager...

I wouldn't buy another slot1 board, because a) They are not worth it and b) They are hard to find...