Older motherboard won't recognize newer hardrive, need help

[Jyoung24]

I'm trying to repair a computer for a friend and here is my dillema. His computer is basically a no-name OEM piece of crap computer built in early 1998. Here's what he has:

Amd K6-2 300
64mb pc-100 ram generic
OEM Hewitt Rand The mobo's model number is (p5f93) the mobo has an (ALI M1542 A1) north bridge chipset
Hdd Fujitsu 4 Gb
AT 200W psu
pci soundcard
8mb agp videocard

My problem is I have reformatted his hard drive countless times , I have done chk disk on the hard drive for any physical erorrs and came up with nothing but when I load an OS on the freshly formatted hdd and try to use the computer it locks up everytime. It usually locks up at the welcome screen before I reach the desktop. However it does not always freeze at the same spot every time. Sometimes I am able to get to the desktop in which it ultimately freezes up agian. I'm wondering if it's a power supply issue, since the computer locks up at different points.

Ive switch out the memory for a different module - nothing!
I switched which bank the memory was in - nothing!
Ive reformatted the hdd and installed a fresh copy of Windows ME and it was still freezing so I put a new copy of Windows XP - nothing!


My real problem here is the fact I tried to connect a new Maxtor ATA/133 hdd to his computer, I got the BIOS to auto dectect the hard drive and all the paramiters showed up as they should have but I was unable to get the computer to get through the entire POST. So my question about this is does it have something to do with LBA and the BIOS which is old (early 1998) not being able to notice hdd's above 8Gb ? Anyway I need help and it's greatly apprciated if anyone has any ideas. Thank you

 

[McCarthy]

Would be shocked if it didn't support at least up to 32gig drives, but wasn't there a diskette that came with it for support on older systems?

 

[Jyoung24]

You mean the hdd? I bought the 20GB Maxtor as a bare drive so nothing came with it. I will take a look at Maxtor's website to see what they have.

 

[Wolfsraider]

can't remember for sure...

but i reinstalled an os on a similar system,it was a nightmare i had to use ezbios from maxtor (i believe it had a quick format but that didn't work i had to format it the long way for the system files to load right and it was touchy lol

then he bought a 20 gig 7200 rpm hdd lol that was harder to get installed it kept giving errors everytime i loaded the os on it 98 did better than se

i finally found a solution that worked easier for me ymmv

put the hdd in a different computer(unplug all your hdd first set it up as primary master then load the os on it then after you get it running and working (don't install drivers)(here you will have to ask around as i run xp pro now and this was 3 years ago but i deleted the enum key in 98 and shut down then transplanted the hdd back into his computer fdisk/mbr reboot and volla no more headaches lol

you think this way is bad it took a week trying every way possible but 98 still crashed repeatedly until this in 6 months it only crashed once when he thought he was running a nvidia card instead of a matrox millenium card lol

hope this helps
mike

 

[xfactordomine]

I had the same sorta problem when I got my brand spankin new 40GB hdd for my old PII350. Hard drive detected, but haaaaaaaaaang.
This may not be the solution you're looking for, but I just solved my problem the easy way (aka. lazy) by buying a Promise ATA100 controller card for like $10 and stuck my new hdd on it.. heh

-X

 

[Eug]

Despite ATA100's supposedly backwards compatibility with ATA66 and ATA33, Windows didn't properly recognize my IBM drive until I set the drive to ATA66. I think this was on my Promise Ultra 66 card (but it might have been on the ATA 33 mobo controller, I can't remember).

Wish me luck on my next Maxtor install - 7200 rpm 20 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 Ultra DMA 100 drive on an old Pentium II 350 with ATA33 controller.

 

[spanky]

maybe u need to install ezbios from maxtor.

 

[Eug]

Check out this utility from Maxtor to switch the drives to ATA66 or ATA33, etc.

If you do use this utility, just note there are different ones for different drives.

 

[Jyoung24]

Thank you all.

 

[Caveman2001]

If none of that works, I would see if you can find and updated BIOS.