Samik R wrote:
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?


No, what I mentioned is a disk manager program that installs a boot loader
on the drive that replaces the limited BIOS IDE handler so the full
capacity of the drive is available, not something that limits the drive.

Something like this one:
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...ive/utilities/

but I don't know if their version will allow usage with other
manufacturer's drives and I note that on the page link you posted they've
removed Disk Manager because "systems with Windows XP and 2000 don't
require it." Not exactly precise because W2k/XP won't 'fix' an old
motherboard BIOS but I guess they just don't support older systems.

Of course, if you don't mind losing drive capacity then the drive limiter
would work.