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An old motherboard, only recognizes 8 GB of a 20GB HD under FAT32, why is that?

A

abu

Senior member
Hi guys, a friend of mine, asked me this question... and he was wondering if flashing his bios would fix this prob...

anyone know why?

TIA 🙂
 
Many of the old motherboards could not recognize more than 2GB per partition, with four partitions per drive, making a max of 8GB. Because of this, some manufacturers simply didn't allow for their motherboards to recognize anything larger than 8GB (since they couldn't use it).

Flashing to a new BIOS might allow you to use the whole drive, but I wouldn't count on it..
 
I'm not sure as to the actual reason, but there is a way around it using overlay software. Check the drive maker's site, the right stuff should be there as a downloadable file.
 
BIOS can stumble at 2.048 GB, 4.2 GB, 8.4 GB and 32 GB. You can either flash the BIOS if available, or download one of the BIOS workarounds from the HD manufacturer as Fardringle/Jhhnn indicated. I think a BIOS flash is a better option if it is available.
 
It would depend on the motherboard. Older boards were only able to recognize up to 8.4GB drives. Some may be BIOS upgradeable, but it's probably too old. Most retail packaged drives come with overlay software (MaxBlast for Maxtor), or you can download it from the manufacturers website. The software runs before your OS and BIOS, so that it can translate the size of the drive into something that the BIOS can recognize. This isn't the optimum solution of course, but it does make it so you can use larger drives with older computers. Even not so old computers may not be able to handle things like 75 gig drives or the upcoming 100GB drives.
 
My friend had this problem,he just installed a ATA-66 Promise controller card & that solved the problem.

🙂
 
It depends on the motherboard in question but some older BIOS only recognized up to 8.4GB partitions. Hence the inability to recognize a larger drive. Instead it will label it as the largest support drive. An upgraded BIOS may possible fix the problem, I would try that first. Assuming the updated BIOS still fails to support larger drives than go to your HDD manufacturers website and they should have a software overlay there that you can download to enable it to see the full size of the HDD.
 
Adding an ata66 card would solve the problem & give a nice speed boost too.

That old board probably only does ata16 since it's old.
 
I think it has something to do with how the BIOS recognizes the cylinders of each drive. Older motherboards were limited by the number of cylinders the BIOS could recognize and thus limited the size of the drive. On a side note, I do have a Biostar 430TX motherboard that was supposedly limited to 8.4gb HDs, but when I put a new 20gb Maxtor in, it recgonized it just fine🙂. The Mator will not be in there for long though. It is going in my new Duron system as soon as it assemble it.
 
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