Hard drive grief

[mesonw]

Now I realise this may have come up many times in the past, but I've searched high and low for the solution to my problem, yet all explanations as for its cause and solutions have failed to get me anywhere.

The problem I have is of a 20gb Seagate Barracuda ATAIII drive showing up as 8gb in WindowsXP when attached to my IDE connections (attaching it to my ATA100 connectors didn't show this problem).

I have tried: -
- different master/slave/cable select options
- different cables
- using primary and secondary IDE connectors
- auto configuring the BIOS to detect the drive (sees 8gb)
- manually configuring the BIOS to set the number of heads/sectors etc - BIOS sees 20gb, but XP sees 8gb
- using fdisk to configure the disk with a 20gb partition... upon reboot, XP still only sees 8gb
- using Seagate's DiscWizard utility to configure the drive: -
- windows version won't start up - just begins and shuts down the process in about 5seconds (i tried reinstalling it a couple of times to no effect)
- bootable floppy version sets the drive as 20gb, says it will overwrite the drive's MBR... XP still only sees 8gb


- BIOS is up to latest on this ageing mobo (A7V133)
- WinXP (+SP2) has no problem seeing all 160gb of a drive attached to an ATA100 port
- have previously (on a way-back installation on this machine) had a 46gb drive attached to the very same IDE port with no problems
- space and cabling limitations mean I can't just set this as a slave on an ATA100 cable

Would a low-level format do the trick maybe, or is it just a limitation of the way the Seagate drive announces its presence on the IDE channels, that my BIOS can't cope with?
It just doesn't seem to make sense.

Any ideas?

 

[tk11]

try installing new via 4in1 drivers.

http://www.viaarena.com/downlo...4in1/VIA_4in1_443v.zip

 

[tk11]

via also makes an ide miniport driver that works with that motherboard (I've tried it).

http://www.viaarena.com/downlo.../VIA_IDE_MPD_V320b.zip

 

[DaveSimmons]

Could be that the drive jumpers on the back are set to 8 GB for compatibility with older P1 motherboards, just like many 40 - 60 GB drives include jumper settings to make the drive act as a 32 GB.

 

[mesonw]

Nice one - cheers tk11!
After all this time... a working drive again (and there was me about to give it away!)

I must've not installed the VIA 4in1 drivers on my system when I re-installed my OS.

The IDE miniport driver did the trick. Upon rebooting, there the drive was, in all its 20gb glory

I've now also installed the AGP part of the 4in1, so hopefully will see a bit more speed from my ageing gf3!

Thanks again tk11.

 

[tk11]

Any time mesonw. Thanks for posting such clear and relevant information about your problem.