I need help with an ancient piece o crap

[gcliv]

I mentioned this system in a post somewhere here, its a P133 with 40 megs of ram. Its got all kinds of problems, everything from IRQ to driver issues. I think I'm ok on everything except this problem with the hard drive...or maybe the bios? The hard drive has Win98 loaded on it. Its been working great for a while. But one day it boots up and Norton DD reports drive C is not configured properly. So the system doesnt boot at all. I head for the bios simply out of no other choice. I see that the hard drive is misreporting the number of cylinders. Everytime that I try to have it auto detect it locks and I cant manually input the number of cyls cuz it doesnt go that high. There must be a solution but it was working b4! I cant find any info on the mobo, the machine is some integrated everything pile that digital made, but compaq bot them out. Anyway I'm babbling and would just appreciate any advice...thanks

 

[AC]

can't u set it to autodetect?

how big is the hdd?

 

[gcliv]

Its a Maxtor 12 gig, and no I cant set it to auto.

 

[Edski]

Go to Maxtor's website and download their diagnostics utility. Run the first 2 tests on the hard drive, if it passes I would say that it is not the hard drive that is causing your problems. Next, unless you updated your bios or have that drive on a controller card, your bios will NOT support that drive. Either you used their software to setup the drive or it wasnt setup correctly to begin with. For that system I would use their bios overlay.

 

[AC]

i think it is a problem with the translation method the bios is using to access the drive. if your partitions were created using a translation method that is different from the one that u are currently trying to use, then u will run into similar problems

since the system might have a bios that doesn't support large hdd that are 8+ GB (this doesn't make sense though since it was working before), u may want to use a drive overlay program that replaces the bios by emulating the required specs through software. i dislike using drive overlay programs since it will limit the functionality of it (i.e u won't be able to use 3rd party utilities such as partitionmagic)

i am running a 13GB WD on a Gateway2000 486DX2 for 1.5 yrs with no problems using the ECHS translation algorithm with autodetect enabled; it has win95osr2 installed due to hardware restrictions

the CHS translation algorithm is the only one that uses the actual numbers for heads/sectors/cylinders. LBA uses different numbers (i don't exactly understand the algorithms enough to explain how they work).

what is the Make of the BIOS? AMI, award, phoenix, etc.? model and version?

 

[gcliv]

I cant find any info on the mobo, so I cant really find a bios update. It says something on the POST about a Starion-FP 5133 but I'm not if this is the mobo or some kind of bios thing. I cant find any info on the net about a Starion-FP5133 mobo if it is one. Its a Phoenix bios. But there is just a total mystery because it was working before with no special setups like overlays.