Old BIOS won't recognize more than 8 gig of HDD?

[LTOwnalot]

Some of you may have read my previous posts requesting help with a computer that has issues booting from CD ROM.

In the end, I took the HDD (belongs to my friend, who has an ancient computer) and put it inside my own computer to reformat it (fix a partition that was messed up).

After I reformatted, I did whatever was necessary to make it so that the HDD will transfer back to the other computer without having XP complain (i think...).

But no matter what i did, the old pc always gives me this message after post: "A disk read error occurred, ctrl-alt-delete to restart computer." I knew immediately that the BIOS is complaining about the HDD

After some googling, I realized something...(the BIOS is Award Modular BIOS V4.51PG, and the mobo is Asus P2B revision 1007)...this mobo with the current BIOS won't recognize any HDD bigger than 8 gb (or 10 depending on the MOBO revision and such).

Since the various info I found online are often contradictory and has many different answers from different people, are there anyone who actually knows if this is true? That because of this BIOS, the HDD (a new 300 gig hdd my friend bought to replace the old 10 gig hdd) that is too big won't work?

I do not think this is an issue of the HDD not being able to boot simply cuz I moved it on here from a different computer, because the HDD couldn't even be read, so that means the OS on the HDD didn't even get a chance to complain, correct?

Thanks for any help.

 

[redbeard1]

I don't actually for sure know what a P2B will see as far as hard drive size, but I have a pretty good educated guess.

Almost all 440BX boards with recognize a 20 gig drive, with most of those able to see a 30 gig. I'd say that with the latest bios for whatever board it is, 70% of those updateable boards would see a 40 gig drive. A very few boards had a bios update that enabled seeing over a 60 gig drive.

The 440BX chipset will actually work with a drive up to 127 gig or 137 gig, I forget which for sure. The bios is the limiting factor.

The best way to get the 300 gig drive to work is to get an IDE controller card. Promise cards are the most common.

In the bios on the old computer, in the basic feature section, make sure that all of the hard drive detection features are set to auto for each IDE channel, especially the column on the far right which has LBA as a choice.

Formatting the drive on a new or even just a different computer, which may use different bios drive geometry settings than an old computer, and then sticking it the old computer, can make it so the drive is not detected correctly.

The other thing may be that the drive has not been set to be active after it was formatted in the other system. The easiest way to do this would be to boot using a win98 startup floppy, with only that hard drive in the system, and run fdisk to make it active.

That error may also just be telling you that the bios can't find the system files on the drive to boot from. 2000/XP puts these files in the proper spot when the OS is installed. 95/98 can be done from a floppy with the the right files on it, and probably with that 98 startup disk.

 

[LTOwnalot]

Can I get more details about how to use fdisk with a win98 floppy? or is it pretty self explanatory once i get there?
I tried the LBA stuff before I posted the questions and they did me no good tho.

 

[stardrek]

Originally posted by: LTOwnalot
Can I get more details about how to use fdisk with a win98 floppy? or is it pretty self explanatory once i get there?
I tried the LBA stuff before I posted the questions and they did me no good tho.

If you updated your BIOS to the most current one, and you are still unable to see more then 8GB on a drive then you are SOL. Without buying a PCI ATA-Controller, like redbeard1 had said, there isn't a way to see large drives on that system.

You might be stuck using a CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) controller, which cannot address (see) anything larger then 8GB because of geometry limitations. Ususally there were BIOS updates for systems when they were limited to CHS with a LBA (Logical Block Addressing) controller update. But, if you have the latest version of the BIOS, and it isn't there, then there is nothing to do but buy that card.

Good Luck.

 

[redbeard1]

In the hard drive detecting features, don't use anything but "auto" settings in all catagories.

Find someone with windows 98, so that you can make a 98 startup floppy disk. To make it you go to the add/remove programs feature in the control panel. When you get there, across the top is three tabs, the third being "startup disk". Choosing that will reveal a button that says "make disk". Follow the prompts to make it.

One of the things that this disk does, is allow you to get any cd drive working at a command line. You could then put an XP cd in the drive and browse to the installer file if needed.

When you get the floppy made, make sure the bios is set to boot from a floppy, and boot the computer. It will give you three menu choices. one to start the install of win98 from a cd, the next to start the computer with cdrom support, and the last is to start the system without cdrom support. Either number 2 or 3 will get you the options to run fdisk.

Typing fdisk at the command prompt will launch it, you want to enable large drive support when it asks. Then if the drive is not set active, it should pop a warning message saying it isn't. Otherwise menu item #2 in fdisk is to set the drive active. It will only allow this proceedure if there is one hard drive, so only have the drive you want active hooked up when you run fdisk.

In the end getting the drive set active, does not get an OS on the drive, so the system is still going to give some sort of error after it passes the bios/post screens. Getting win98 on it is probably going to be the easiest without being able to boot directly from a cd, if you can get the startup disk made.