New HD in an Abit BH6

[DarinT]

A friend bought an ATA100 Maxtor HD.. He can't get it to work in his Abit BH6.. Does that thing even support ATA100? On there web page, it says that they support only udam33, but he already has a udma 66 drive..
if it doesn't support ata100, is there some way that we can turn it down to a lower speed?
he says that he download some bios update that is supposed to do it (for the motherboard letting it use newer hd's)

 

[jsbush]

It only supports udma 33, but the drive should still work, it will just force it self to work at 33 instead of 100. Did you flash with the newest bios?

 

[DarinT]

yeah. he says that it was working.. and now all of a sudden, it just stoped.. it's the diamond max plus 45 drive..

 

[KR]

The IDE controller for the BH6 is the same as on my BX6 (part of the BX chipset) so it should work (continue to work)- have your friend check his cabling. The drive is spec'd to be 100% backwards compatible with UDMA33 and UDMA66 ans sell as being ATA100 compatible.

 

[Jeff H]

Depending on the BIOS version on your friend's BH6, he may need to get a utility off Maxtor's website that allows him to change the UDMA setting on the hard drive.

I'm running a rev1.02 BH6 and before I flashed to the SS BIOS I attempted to install an IBM 22GXP drive, and needed to run IBM's ATA switching utility in order for the BIOS to recognize the 22GXP. After a flash to a later BIOS (and a format/reinstall of Win98) I found that I didn't need to have the UDMA setting at a lower level.

Just recently I installed an IBM 75GXP drive and did not need to change the UDMA setting of that drive from it's shipping UDMA5 setting.

So, either update the BH6 BIOS or get the switching utility from Maxtor. Also (and this should not be necessary, but may be helpful) your friend may want to get an 80 wire ATA66/100 EIDE cable. This is not required, but in some cases can help drive integrity and/or performance.