Harddrive and bios limitation and tech support sucks at abit and maxtor

[CandyKid]

I've been having a hell of a time getting my 40 gig Maxtor harddrive to show up at 40 gigs instead of 32 in bios...

Back in March when i built the system i first installed it and tried all the various jumper positions (including the cylindar limitation jumper) changed all the bios block modes (lba, normal, auto). Tried to manually install the drive by inputing the cylindars, heads, etc. No matter what i did i couldn't get it to show up as 40 gigs in my bios. So i flashed the bios with the current updates still no luck.

I don't remember if i ever used the smartdrive software to see if i could get it to 40 with that software because i was installing win2k on it and it's not compatible with a NTFS FAT and or win2k.

So i called the tech support at maxtor ran me through all the stuff i already did then finally they just said it had to be my bios.

I emailed abit but never got a response. Their tech support is horrible. Finally i just said f it and installed 2k on the 32 gig drive. I'm now reformatting and repartitioning so i thought i would try again.

Has anyone else had a problem like this with the ka7 motherboard? Is there any software that works in win2k and ntfs that will allow me to jump the bios limitation and at the same time not affect my performance... I really could use some extra space.

thanks for reading this long post

Other info-
Bios Award Modular v6.00p6

 

[CAMS]

Did you have any trouble with FDISK? Did it allow you to partition the drive into 2, say a 10 & 30?

 

[Pederv]

You've probably already tried this but... have you tried the hard drive in another system? The drive could be labeled wrong.

 

[CandyKid]

it comes up in bios as 32 gigs usually when it's a operating system limitation it shows up as its normal size i thought? Regardless it's been in win98 and 2k machines

 

[CandyKid]

and yeah with fdisk i could only partition up to 32 gigs

 

[NeonFlak]

It could be a very good possiblity that it is only a 32gig drive. Bios shouldn't limit the harddrive size. It shows the true size of the harddrive. The only thing that limits harddrive size I believe was fat16. Unless some of your cylinders are bad you got a 32gig harddrive there.

 

[Adul]

Is there a jumper for the maxtor drive that makes it look like a 32 GB drive?

 

[DaddyG]

The 32 gig limit could be one of a couple of things. Most large hard-drives have a jumper to limit the number of cylinders. INT 13 extensions added 4 extra bits to extend the cylinder, head, and sector addressing schemes. BUT, newer, large HDDs have lots of cylinders and not so many heads, and they 'freak out' some BIOS's. Limited Cylinder mode set a jumper to stop the BIOS freaking, check your HDD jumpers. You can also select LBA (Logical Block Addressing) if you BIOS supports it. In this mode, instead of using cyl, head, sector, the drive usues logical blocks starting from zero to address the data.

FAT16 will NOT limit the detection in the BIOS, this is purely a limitation in the OS.

 

[CandyKid]

okay i'm pretty sure i have a 40 gig drive because I THINK that i ran smartdrive when i had win98 and got it to 40 gigs...

I will play around with the cylindar limitation jumper again.

But i like i said i called maxtor tech support and they made me play around with the jumpers with them on the phone.

I'm gonna put it in another computer and see what it shows up as.

 

[bacillus]

if it's a bios limitation thing that can't be overcome then put the drive on a promise ata100 card,a drastic solution I know! the ata 100 card has a bios limitation of 128Gb!

 

[CandyKid]

well it's like being limited in bios but it shouldn't be because the bios can support larger drives.

i guess i could try booting it off my ata66 card.. I got to go to class i'll give that a try when i get back around 5

 

[DaddyG]

Candykid, do you have an LBA mode option in your BIOS ??

 

[CandyKid]

yep and i have it in lba


i have the abit ka7... it's the kx133 chipset..

it's pretty new about a year old