Bios not recognizing new hard drive

[JRW160]

I am putting a new hard drive on a friend's computer, and I can't get the hard drive recognized in the bios. The hard drive has been formatted FAT32 in WinXP, but is being put on a cpu that will be running Windows98. I created two partitions because the drive is 60gb and too big for FAT32. This is the only hard drive on the computer. Whenever it is booting up, it tries to auto-detect the hard drive, and the computer just sits there, trying to detect the drive. It will detect the cd-rom and everything fine, just not the hard drive. Please help, I am at a loss as to what to do.

 

[Tripleshot]

Bios may need to be flashed with an update to recognize large HDD's. If its an older board,you may be out of luck with that HDD. Do you have a smaller one to test it out with, say a 20 gig?

 

[cholley]

tripleshot is right some bios sets have screwey limits on hard drive size so check for a bios update

 

[JRW160]

Should I try to create more partitions if I can't find a bios update. The motherboard is pretty old, so that could be the problem. Could it possibly work if I created say three partitions that are a little less than 20GB each? Also I know the first partition needs to be a primary partitions, but as for the second and third, do they need ot be primary or extended? Thanks.

 

[Tripleshot]

The bios does not look at partitions. It looks at the total size of the HDD, all clusters and cylinders. Get an up to date mobo. Its worth the price and effort. Old mobos suck.

 

[stockjock]

Like they said earlier too....look to see if there is a bios upgrade that will allow for large HDD

 

[bruincal]

i had this exact same problem with my old system ...
i put in a 100gb hard drive into my celeron 366 motherboard .. and the bios stalled everytime it tried to detect the drive ...
the upper limit of my BIOS was 64 GB

i believe the BIOS limits are either 32 GB, 64GB, and 134GB for the current IDE standard ...

be careful you find the exact match for your motherboard .... i've seen lots of motherboards ruined with wrong flashes .. rendering the motherboard dead.

 

[Freewolf]

Most hds come with software to allow you to bypass the limits of the bios with an overlay.