Help! Abit bh6 with Maxtor 40 gig and win xp!

[tlucca]

Hi all,

Im having very frustrating trouble with my maxtor 40 gig 7200 rpm hd (ata 100) on my abit bh6 ver 1.01 mobo when trying to get windows xp home to work. When I try to boot win xp from the cd doing a clean install to my hd, win xp is able to format the hd with both fat32 and ntfs, it then copies the startup files to the HD, but when it reboots to run the setup files, a message comes up stating "error loading operating system". If I format with fat 32 it says "missing operating system".

Now the strange thing is, when I put the jumper pin in to limit the Maxtor HD size to 32 gig, everything boots up fine! I know your probably thinking I need the latest bios, but I have that; SS version. the only way I can get it to work is by putting the size limiting jumper into my HD. Id like to get the full 40 gig working. Any suggestions??

Ive contacted microsoft and maxtor but havent gotten Abit yet (their site is down). Everyone seems to blame everyone else. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Tom

 

[tlucca]

Hi again,

Oh, by the way, I have a pentium III 750 on the system.

thanks in advance for the info,
Tom

 

[squirrel dog]

You have the bios set to auto to see the h/d?

 

[tlucca]

Hi,

Yes, the bios is set to auto and is recognizing the HD accurately down to the model number. I have no idea what is causing this problem.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Tom

 

[squirrel dog]

I would set it at 32gigs and let it rip.I do not know why that would happen,I have two bh6's and a bx6,but I run 98se.I have had trouble in the past with a drive or two dropping out,not being 'seen' by the pc.It has always been a cmos/bios thing.The cmos would revert to the boot drive being configed,and the others being'lost'Setting the cmos back to auto would fix this.This happened the last time daylight savings went into effect,I lost my'd' drive.Looked into cmos and reset the settings to auto,back to normal.As cheap as drives are,get it up at 32gigs,and slave another drive to it.

 

[cr4pz0r]

tlucca, that BH6 came out long before 40GB hard drives were even introduced. Your motherboard has an Award 4.51PG BIOS, which in many motherboards doesn't properly support hard drives larger than 33.8GB.

What is the BIOS date (the date on the lower left hand corner when your system boots up initializing the BIOS)? If it's prior to 10/30/1999, it probably has the 33.8GB barrier.

 

[tlucca]

Hi all,

The bios date is 5/20/2000. the Bios description on the abit site tells me it should support up to 80 gig HD. Still not working though.

Any other suggestions?

Tom

 

[squirrel dog]

Yeah,I have one more suggestion.In my main rig,I run a 10 gig h/d for c;a 10 gig drive for d;a 4gig drive for e;and an 80 gig drive split into two 37.5 gig partitions,as f&g.The 80gig drive along with the two ten gig drives are plugged into two different ata100 promise cards.These I got from compusa.The bios on the ata100 controller cards takes controll at boot.You will need the xp drivers for one,but it could be a work around to your problem.The only reason I ever went with this is the fact that the first card came free with the 80gig drive(Maxtor).It worked,and I liked the ata100 bus,so I got another one for the two 10gig drives.For older mo/bo's this is a solution that seems to work.If you can't afford the board or another drive,use it at 32gigs,or try another os other than xp.