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Old December 21st 05, 05:59 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
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Default HDD Compatibility

Samik R wrote:
On 12/20/2005 6:17 PM, DaveW wrote:

The BIOS in the motherboard of your older computer will NOT be able to
recognize a drive as large as 250 GB. You are probably limited to a
10 GB harddrive, unless you can find a BIOS update for your
motherboard that allows a somewhat larger than 10 GB drive.

Thanks Dave and Conor. So to take care of the BIOS problem, I have to
essentially find out the brand of motherboard, go to the website and see
if they have any updates which take cares of this issue. Am I right?


Correct, and that would be the ideal solution but with a motherboard that
old the odds are not promising they upgraded it so recently.

For 48-bit LBA, google search lead me to http://www.48bitlba.com/, which
says that it depends on the OS etc. I was planning to run XP Home w/
SP2, so the problem might be taken care of.


XP SP2 will not do anything to help the motherboard understand a large
drive. It's just that they both need to understand it and SP2 takes care of
the XP end, only.

Am I missing something?


There are two other choices. One is to buy an add-on IDE controller that
supports 48 bit LBA.

The last 'free' choice is to use the hard drive loader that usually comes
with large hard drives, or can be downloaded from their site, that writes a
48 bit LBA IDE BIOS handler onto the boot track so that it loads when the
drive boots, rendering the BIOS (in memory) 48 bit aware without an actual
flash BIOS update. The down side to this, since it's not actually in the
BIOS flash chip but on the hard drive boot track, is that if you boot from
anything else, such as a virus scanner or repair disk of some sort, the
hard drive will not operate properly unless you load the BIOS patch first,
either from the hard drive or a floppy utility disk, because the IDE patch
isn't there. The provided boot loader usually pauses right at boot to give
you the chance to ask for a floppy or CD boot, slowing things down a bit,
so you can still use those things but if you change the BIOS boot sequence
to check those devices first and boot from them you'll have bypassed the
IDE patch load with the potential consequences already mentioned.