On 12/21/2005 10:59 AM, David Maynard wrote:
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.
Finally got time to work on this.
Of course, I want to try the second option mentioned by David first. On this end, I found out the utility which I think I should use:
At:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Program: Feature Tool (v2.00)
Manual:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/suppor..._guide_199.pdf
It says that, this tool allows you to "Change the predefined capacity of the drive. This option can be used in situations where there is a BIOS limitation and the drive is not recognized." This is the same as what David was mention, right?
--
Please reply to the newsgroup.
To mail me directly, replace 'K' with 'e'.