Old mobo ASUS P2B, how large hd does it support??

[Frolic]

Hi,
I'm planning on cranking up my old system based on an ASUS P2B mobo. With BIOS Ver. 1012 I know it supports any Intel 100MHz FSB cpu as long as I can fix right voltage (with a slotket if needed).
The only thing I don't know is how large hd it supports with BIOS 1012? Can't be less than Bios Ver. 1011 that says "Support IDE hard disk larger than 32G bytes"... and what does that mean? up to 60G bytes or 120 or what?? (I'm planning on 60 or 80Gb)

Got info from a user with ASUS P2B BIOS ver.1012 with an ata 100/133 pci ide controller running a 40 gb hdd, works fine. Wonder if a 60 or 80 gb will work??

Thanks
Frolic

 

[Mikki]

I'm talkin off the top of my head, it's been a while since I've dealt with this. I think the main limiting factor on that board will be the ide bus itself, if you want to use one of the newer drives to it's fastest bus specs, you might have to get a controller card. If not, you could install it and it'll just run at a slower bus speed (I forget what speed that board supports). Other than that, your only other limiting factor should be the operating system/drivers. If those support big old drives, you're golden. I was using a WD 30G on my P4B with no problems. If you're using, say, WinXP or WINME, you shouldn't have any problems formatting to full capacity. Hope this helps!

 

[Frolic]

Thanks! Looks like a controller card is a must if I want a larger hdd.
Looks like old Sparky will survive for now...

 

[Mikki]

If you wanna take advantage of the faster bus speeds, yeah. If you just want a big hard drive, you should be able to use the controller on the mobo.....

 

[Iron Woode]

Here is a better idea for boards that have a BIOS limit for hard drive size: overlay software like EZ-BIOS.

The software works great with out mucking around with obscure BIOSes.

 

[PiSquared]

I have a P2B running with an 80GB HD. I'm running a beta BIOS Ver. 1014 from Asus's German FTP site. That was several months ago... the BIOS might be final by now. Anyway, works great.