P5TX-B motherboard and Award BIOS: help?

[Arschloch]

Hello all.

My parents have an old 200 MHz PowerSpec (Micro Center-made) Pentium MMX box.

They installed a 10 GB Maxtor hard drive. Win 98 correctly detects it at that size. However, the BIOS claims it is ~ 8.45 GB. We've run the HDD auto-detect several times in BIOS, and it still claims that the drive is ~ 8.45 GB.

Apparently because of this discrepancy, Norton Utilities will not allow Speed Disk (= Defrag) or Disk Doctor to be run.

The obvious solution, of course, is to flash new BIOS. After all, the BIOS was dated July, 1997. Unfortunately, I've been finding it impossible to find updated BIOS for this motherboard because Award was swallowed up by Phoenix, whose website is not helpful at all.

Any ideas? Similar experiences? My parents need your help.

If anyone knows where to get updated BIOS that will fix the problem, or any other way to fix the problem, I'd be extremely appreciative.

Thanks in advance.

-Arschloch

 

[MoonSword]

I have a very, very similar motherboard. In my smaller rig, I've got an ECS P5TX Bpro (rev2.0a).
It is not much different than yours. The trouble with the hard disk is in the motherboard's chipset, Intel 430TX PCI Set.
This particular chipset will only support hard disks up to 8.4 GB. That's why your hard disk isn't being detected correctly.
Perhaps Maxtor has an external hard disk BIOS utility available that can help you out.
I do not know much about them as I have never tried to use a hard disk that won't match up to my motherboard chipset.
But from what I hear, these utilities will install a BIOS program that is loaded during bootup, and it will correct issues with a chipset not being able to acess the entire drive.

As for a flash upgrade, you can get one from ECS's website. Here's a direct link to the flash upgrades for your board:
http://www.ecsusa.com/ecsusa/www.ecs.com.tw/download/p5txb.htm

The flash utility is here: http://www.ecsusa.com/ecsusa/www.ecs.com.tw/download/flash.htm

The latest BIOS available from their website is dated 4/28/97, so you probably have no need to flash it.

Moon

P.S. I have a problem in trying to get an ATAPI CD-ROM to work on the Secondary Master IDE channel of my ECS P5TX-Bpro motherboard.
All my hardware is fine, and I've quadruple checked all the connections.
The motherboard will detect the CD-ROM during POST, but once an operating system is booted, the device drivers cannot find the CD-ROM.
If you have successfully gotten an ATAPI CD-ROM to work on the secondary IDE channel, could you share some words of wisdom with me?
Thanks.

 

[Arschloch]

MoonSword,

Thank you very much for your input. I really appreciate your words.

I went to the ecsusa website you mentioned. What's interesting is that the most recent BIOS revision says that it adds support for hard drives larger than 8.4 GB. Go figure! As it turns out, the BIOS on the machine is the same as the most updated BIOS on the ecsusa website.

I will attempt to find the Maxtor utility you mentioned. I had a Maxtor hard drive several years ago and I recall something called "MaxBlast", or something along those lines, that would partition and format a hard drive. I don't recall if there were other utilities on the disk or not. However, I'll see what I can find. Thanks for the suggestion.

As far as your CD-ROM issue is concerned... I really wish I could help you out. As I mentioned in the first post, the computer having this hard drive issue belongs to my parents, and I am quite sure that they won't let me open it up. That seems like a really strange problem to be having though, if BIOS finds it but the OS does not. How about DOS? Can you use the CD-ROM there? Have you tried another ribbon?

Good luck.

-Arschloch

 

[MoonSword]

I tried another ribbon, and still have problems. I'm trying to access the CD-ROM in a DOS environment because I want to install Windows on it. But both the CD-ROM's own DOS .sys driver and a generic Oak ATAPI driver I have both cannot detect the CD-ROM. I'm still plugging at it, though.

Moon