Overriding motherboard's hard drive capacity limit

[Poofy McPoofjohnson]

I have an MSI K7N2-Delta motherboard which can only support HD's up to 160GB. I would like to know if there is some way of overriding this limit and having it recognize a 500GB drive.

Also, I am not clear on whether the mobo will simply not recognize a drive over the limit, or be able to at least recognize the 500GB drive but only list it as a 160GB. This would not be a problem if Windows still displays the drive as 500GB and allows me to use it at its full capacity. Or is it the case that if the BIOS doesn't read the drive, then necessarily Windows won't be able to read it either?

 

[Elixer]

There is a jumper on most PATA HDs that will bypass that limit, but, since this board is a NF2 based, it *should* be able to handle 48bit-LBA...you sure they don't have a BIOS update that fixes that?

 

[taltamir]

AFAIK the jumper on the HDD will ENFORCE that limit to prevent the mobo from failing to recognize the drive, not make the drive somehow appear as more to the mobo.
This isn't some "feature" to deactivate, your mobo only supports 160GB HDD, you want more, you need another mobo...

just buy a 10$ SATA or PATA controller (not a RAID controller, just S/ATA)

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: taltamir
AFAIK the jumper on the HDD will ENFORCE that limit to prevent the mobo from failing to recognize the drive, not make the drive somehow appear as more to the mobo.
This isn't some "feature" to deactivate, your mobo only supports 160GB HDD, you want more, you need another mobo...

just buy a 10$ SATA or PATA controller (not a RAID controller, just S/ATA)

Whoops!
I misspoke, that is what the jumper is for.

I find it odd that they only support 160GB, since the limit normally was 137GB.

I guess your best bet is to just get a new controller card, as taltamir suggests, or just get a new motherboard. Those are pretty cheap as well.

 

[Paperdoc]

IF your mobo's BIOS supports only the older 28-bit LBA version, there is a chance you could have trouble trying to use a drive over 128 GB (well, drive makers call this 137 GB). I agree it's odd that you were told it could handle up to 160 GB.

Anyway, often the best solution to this is an updated BIOS that you download and flash into your mobo BIOS chip, but it MUST specifically state that it supports "48-bit LBA", not just plain "LBA support for large hard drives". If you can do that, you should have no difficulty using large modern drives. If not, as others have said, adding a small SATA drive controller card will solve it - its BIOS will do the job, because ALL SATA systems support 48-bit LBA.

 

[WildW]

There used to be software ways around this kind of limit back in the old days. . . I recall machines that couldn't cope with more than 8GB hard drives being able to use all of a 40GB drive with some software that the hard disk manufacturers would let you download. Something called Easy-Bios or something.

It slowed things down a bit, but it let you use all the space. It also made the partition unreadable in any other machine if you moved the hard drive over, so I figure some sort of addressing translation was in use.

 

[tcsenter]

K7N2-Delta with the latest BIOS supports drives in excess of 160GB. That was just the largest drive that MSI officially tested. Should be good up to 300GB but I wouldn't go much beyond that due to the dated BIOS code.

 

[RebateMonger]

As noted, a $10 to $30 PCI SATA controller card will work fine to allow booting to a large SATA drive. I've got a couple of those in various older PCs running Windows Home Server with 1 TB boot drives.

If you don't need to boot to the SATA drive, then it's even easier: Insert the card, install the driver, and hook up the large SATA drive. Be sure if you are using XP that SP1 or higher is installed. If you are going to boot to the drive, then slipstream your XP Install CD to SP1 or higher before installing XP onto the new drive.

 

[Poofy McPoofjohnson]

OK, I am going buy a controller card. I am trying to choose between two cards, one has a VIA chipset and the other apparently has no onboard chipset, at least it doesn't say it does. Will the card with no chipset (if indeed it has none) still then abide by the parameters set by the motherboard? Or not?

The two cards are listed below. Is there an advantage to the slightly more expensive card? Or would the least expensive one do the exact same job as the other? I would tend to avoid cheap products for the potential compatibility problems, but then it might just work fine. Please help.

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=...0Technologies%20Inc%2E

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=...0Technologies%20Inc%2E

 

[RebateMonger]

Any chance of getting something other than nGear? I can't find ANY support site for nGear. Their site is a single page with an email address. That'd worry me.

I've used a couple of the Rosewill cards on Newegg (both the RC-212 and RC-210) with good success. Newegg has a Canadian site.

 

[tcsenter]

Grab the latest BIOS for your mobo and try the 500GB drive. As I stated, 160GB is simply the largest actually tested by MSI, not the largest supported.

The other SATA card uses JMicron controller chip. Same as the generic Koutech and Syba stuff.