AOpen AX6BC Pro/DiamondMax Plus 9 60GB

i845G

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May 31, 2002
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Can AOpen AX6BC Pro motherboard support DiamondMax Plus 9 60GB HD? How large the HD can this MB support?
 

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
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Aopen's site states that BIOS v1.07 can support HDD > 33GB but not > 137GB, so I suspect its somewhere in between. The current BIOS is v1.15 so there have been a few updates since 1.07.

I see there are a few identical messages posted to Aopen's Forums within the last couple days, I presume that is you?

Anyway, I would go ahead and buy the drive, there is a very good chance it will support the full 60GB. 60GB HDD have been available for quite a long time now and at least two BIOS updates have been released during that time. They don't mention HDD support but tech some times fails to mention every feature or change of a new BIOS version.

On Edit - If it fails to detect the entire capacity, you have a few choices:

- Buy a cheap ATA/IDE PCI controller card with BIOS for $20 - $25, which would offer the benefit of using the drive in a 'faster' mode than UDMA/33.

- Use the 'alternate capacity' jumper on the drive if it is available, which would limit the drive to 33GB.

- Use a drive overlay utility such as Maxblast
 

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,905
556
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Are you using AX6BC Pro MB too?
Nope, sorry.
What is Maxblast utility?
Maxblast is Maxtor's version of On Track's EZ Disk or Disk Manager dynamic drive overlay software translation utility. Every HDD manufacturer has their own customized version of this utility.

It is a software program that loads during the early stages of the boot process and takes control of the LBA/geometry translation in software instead of BIOS to overcome a HDD capacity limitation. It's not as ideal as a hardware solution, such as a BIOS update or PCI controller card with on-card BIOS, but it works well enough and serves its purpose.