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Large Hard Drive & BIOS upgrade problems
Hi
Im not sure if its OK to post this here but its very tecky so I hope someone may be able to help me. Sorry if its a little off topic. My Boot drive is 60G and my old BIOS saw that OK and Fdisk partitioned it OKsome time ago. For extra storage. I bought a Seagate 120G drive and my then present BIOS would not see more than 32,248M of the new drive. I then used Seagate's DDO which worked OK for a few days and it did enable me to format and use the whole drive. However, after a while, new, large, garbled, phantom folders began appearing. They could not be deleted. It was not possible to use either scandisk or defrag on the drive because of the DDO. I decided to remove the DDO with Seagate tools and go for a BIOS flash upgrade. I went to www.esupport.com and a link on their website tested my old BIOS and said that an upgrade was available which would support up to 512G drives. It was specifically designed for my motherboard. It cost about £14. The flash was sent in an email with full instructions and was very easy. Unfortunately, the new BIOS still only showed the same disk drive space as the old one. Even using Fdisk (the one in ME which supports larger drives), it could only see and partition 32,248M of the new drive (100% used as primary dos partition). E-support have tried to help, via many emails, with this problem. They argue that I must be doing something wrong because the new BIOS sees the full 60G of my Boot drive (as did my old BIOS) and therefore it cannot be faulty. All cables are connected correctly. The new drive is set as secondary master. The jumpers are all correct on all devices. There is no limit jumper on the new drive. I have even disconnected all other drives/CD/DVD and tried the new drive as Primary Master but the BIOS still only sees 32,248M. I have read every Microsoft article about large drives in ME but this cannot be a Windows issue anyway, can it? I have the newest chipset drives from my motherboard manufacturer. My IDE controller should support large drives. Why can my old and new BIOS see the full extent of a 60G drive but only 32,248M of a 120G drive. E-support say this is impossible. They say it must see 60G in both and should see all of the 120G drive. I can only say that they have tried very hard to resolve this. I don't want to return my new BIOS flash and get a refund because im just back where I started. Any ideas please so that I can pass them to E-support. Thanks a lot Nigel Motherboard Mercury (Kobian) KOB 845 NFSX) Chipset Intel 1A30 rev 3 120 GIG Seagate drive (model ST3120022A) Microsoft Windows ME Version: 4.90.3000 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1500 Mhz Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG (Release 5.0) AwardBIOS Upgrade Provided by eSupport.com --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.703 / Virus Database: 459 - Release Date: 10/06/2004 |
#2
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"Lago Jardin" wrote in message . .. Hi Im not sure if its OK to post this here but its very tecky so I hope someone may be able to help me. Sorry if its a little off topic. My Boot drive is 60G and my old BIOS saw that OK and Fdisk partitioned it OKsome time ago. For extra storage. I bought a Seagate 120G drive and my then present BIOS would not see more than 32,248M of the new drive. I then used Seagate's DDO which worked OK for a few days and it did enable me to format and use the whole drive. However, after a while, new, large, garbled, phantom folders began appearing. They could not be deleted. It was not possible to use either scandisk or defrag on the drive because of the DDO. I decided to remove the DDO with Seagate tools and go for a BIOS flash upgrade. I went to www.esupport.com and a link on their website tested my old BIOS and said that an upgrade was available which would support up to 512G drives. It was specifically designed for my motherboard. It cost about £14. WTF, you don't pay for bios updates, ver 1.1a is available here; http://snipurl.com/704h This looks like the latest version available, I wish I could sell bios updates by email, LOL. The flash was sent in an email with full instructions and was very easy. Unfortunately, the new BIOS still only showed the same disk drive space as the old one. Even using Fdisk (the one in ME which supports larger drives), it could only see and partition 32,248M of the new drive (100% used as primary dos partition). E-support have tried to help, via many emails, with this problem. They argue that I must be doing something wrong because the new BIOS sees the full 60G of my Boot drive (as did my old BIOS) and therefore it cannot be faulty. All cables are connected correctly. The new drive is set as secondary master. The jumpers are all correct on all devices. There is no limit jumper on the new drive. I have even disconnected all other drives/CD/DVD and tried the new drive as Primary Master but the BIOS still only sees 32,248M. I have read every Microsoft article about large drives in ME but this cannot be a Windows issue anyway, can it? I have the newest chipset drives from my motherboard manufacturer. My IDE controller should support large drives. Why can my old and new BIOS see the full extent of a 60G drive but only 32,248M of a 120G drive. E-support say this is impossible. They say it must see 60G in both and should see all of the 120G drive. I can only say that they have tried very hard to resolve this. I don't want to return my new BIOS flash and get a refund because im just back where I started. Demand a refund now, it doesn't work, and even if it did how are they going to know that you've got it installed. Get the FREE official bios from Kobian and re-flash it anyway, it definately sounds like a bios issue, but the fact that it recognises your 60GB drive is confusing. I can't remember what sizes can give problems, but almost everything from the last couple of years should recognise upto IIRC 138GB, then you need LBA48 support (?) for drives larger than this. If they've hacked around with the bios, even just to change the description, then I wouldn't trust it to be stable. There are people who hack bioses, but they are competant programmers/hackers, and their efforts are excellent. Any ideas please so that I can pass them to E-support. Tell them that they are robbing *******s ;o) On a more serious note, please don't take offence from my post it's just that I've never heard of anyone paying for a bios, bios-chip perhaps after corruption etc., but not a bios file freely available. Try going into the bios, (hopefully the official 1.1b), and auto detecting the drives again, or try setting it manually in the bios. HTH -- Ian |
#3
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"Apollo" wrote in message ... Try going into the bios, (hopefully the official 1.1b), and auto detecting the drives again, or try setting it manually in the bios. Sorry this should read 1.1a -- Ian |
#4
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Hi Ian
Yer i agree with u about paying for a BIOS flash. It was very much a last resort having paid out for a 120G drive. I saw the flash upgrade for my motherboard on Mercury's site but it only contained minor fixes. In fact, there was a direct link from their website to esupport who Mercury say now provide the latest flash upgrades for their m/b. So the implication was that if u want the very latest u have to pay. As I paid by credit card I can get a refund if i dont get it working. Ive plenty of evidence from them that they guarantee 100% success. It may be a rip off but i doubt it because of the number/speed of support emails they have sent me. Having said that, it still doesn't work Any idea why my BIOS (new and old) can see all of a 60G drive but only about 32G of a 120G drive. Could there be any remnants of the DDO hanging around? Thanks again for taking time to reply and ur help. Nigel "Apollo" wrote in message ... "Lago Jardin" wrote in message . .. Hi Im not sure if its OK to post this here but its very tecky so I hope someone may be able to help me. Sorry if its a little off topic. My Boot drive is 60G and my old BIOS saw that OK and Fdisk partitioned it OKsome time ago. For extra storage. I bought a Seagate 120G drive and my then present BIOS would not see more than 32,248M of the new drive. I then used Seagate's DDO which worked OK for a few days and it did enable me to format and use the whole drive. However, after a while, new, large, garbled, phantom folders began appearing. They could not be deleted. It was not possible to use either scandisk or defrag on the drive because of the DDO. I decided to remove the DDO with Seagate tools and go for a BIOS flash upgrade. I went to www.esupport.com and a link on their website tested my old BIOS and said that an upgrade was available which would support up to 512G drives. It was specifically designed for my motherboard. It cost about £14. WTF, you don't pay for bios updates, ver 1.1a is available here; http://snipurl.com/704h This looks like the latest version available, I wish I could sell bios updates by email, LOL. The flash was sent in an email with full instructions and was very easy. Unfortunately, the new BIOS still only showed the same disk drive space as the old one. Even using Fdisk (the one in ME which supports larger drives), it could only see and partition 32,248M of the new drive (100% used as primary dos partition). E-support have tried to help, via many emails, with this problem. They argue that I must be doing something wrong because the new BIOS sees the full 60G of my Boot drive (as did my old BIOS) and therefore it cannot be faulty. All cables are connected correctly. The new drive is set as secondary master. The jumpers are all correct on all devices. There is no limit jumper on the new drive. I have even disconnected all other drives/CD/DVD and tried the new drive as Primary Master but the BIOS still only sees 32,248M. I have read every Microsoft article about large drives in ME but this cannot be a Windows issue anyway, can it? I have the newest chipset drives from my motherboard manufacturer. My IDE controller should support large drives. Why can my old and new BIOS see the full extent of a 60G drive but only 32,248M of a 120G drive. E-support say this is impossible. They say it must see 60G in both and should see all of the 120G drive. I can only say that they have tried very hard to resolve this. I don't want to return my new BIOS flash and get a refund because im just back where I started. Demand a refund now, it doesn't work, and even if it did how are they going to know that you've got it installed. Get the FREE official bios from Kobian and re-flash it anyway, it definately sounds like a bios issue, but the fact that it recognises your 60GB drive is confusing. I can't remember what sizes can give problems, but almost everything from the last couple of years should recognise upto IIRC 138GB, then you need LBA48 support (?) for drives larger than this. If they've hacked around with the bios, even just to change the description, then I wouldn't trust it to be stable. There are people who hack bioses, but they are competant programmers/hackers, and their efforts are excellent. Any ideas please so that I can pass them to E-support. Tell them that they are robbing *******s ;o) On a more serious note, please don't take offence from my post it's just that I've never heard of anyone paying for a bios, bios-chip perhaps after corruption etc., but not a bios file freely available. Try going into the bios, (hopefully the official 1.1b), and auto detecting the drives again, or try setting it manually in the bios. HTH -- Ian --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.703 / Virus Database: 459 - Release Date: 10/06/2004 |
#5
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Hi Ian
In the flash upgrade. Auto detect is on. It only auto detects about 32G of the 120G drive. I cannot use the manual setting, it just reverts back to auto. I was going to try the manual detect and get the setting from the Seagate site. Do u mean reverse the flash and get the 1.1b flash? Thanks Nigel "Apollo" wrote in message ... "Apollo" wrote in message ... Try going into the bios, (hopefully the official 1.1b), and auto detecting the drives again, or try setting it manually in the bios. Sorry this should read 1.1a -- Ian --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.703 / Virus Database: 459 - Release Date: 10/06/2004 |
#6
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"Lago Jardin" wrote in message . .. Hi Ian In the flash upgrade. Auto detect is on. It only auto detects about 32G of the 120G drive. I cannot use the manual setting, it just reverts back to auto. I was going to try the manual detect and get the setting from the Seagate site. Do u mean reverse the flash and get the 1.1b flash? Thanks Yes, I personally would flash with the latest official version (1.1a), from the link I gave, (you can always re-flash the esupport bios). I always follow this procedure when flashing, may not apply to your mobo, but can't do any harm whatsoever and will result in a 'clean' bios flash, print it out and follow it; 1) Flash the new bios. 2) Unplug the power lead, wait for 5 mins for residual power to clear from the psu and reset the cmos using the jumpers on mobo. 3) Start-up, enter bios and load optimised defaults. 4) Re-start, enter bios and change any settings you need. This should give you a good starting point, I am thinking that maybe it has something to do with the overlay software you used, even though you removed it. Have you tried starting from a boot floppy and running Fdisk? I'd try resetting the mbr, run [Fdisk /mbr] from boot floppy, (re-start maybe needed, not sure), then run Fdisk, delete all partitions and start again. I'm not sure if Fdisk can sort it out, it's sort of a chicken and egg problem, if you've already booted, (even from floppy), the bios has then decided that this a 32GB drive, I think that Fdisk may see it as 32GB as well. Can you connect the new drive to another recent pc, that you definitely know supports larger drives, and see what size it reports. If it shows 120GB then it's your bios, if it shows 32GB then it's some remnant of the overlay software. I'm not familiar with Seagate's utilities, but if it is some remnant of the overlay software, contact their support people, say you installed the DDO, then removed it and the drive still reports as 32GB, even on a known large-drive compatible system. BTW this made me laugh, from your correspondence with esupport. quote Note: If you have trouble accessing our order page, try leaving the "s" off the "https" in your browser window. /quote These esupport people must be f**king stupid, advising people that it's ok to give their credit card details over a non-secure web page!!!!! I wonder if you could sue them if your credit card got ripped off. I'll keep looking around for ya. HTH -- Ian |
#7
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On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 13:20:41 GMT, "Lago Jardin"
wrote: Hi Ian Yer i agree with u about paying for a BIOS flash. It was very much a last resort having paid out for a 120G drive. I saw the flash upgrade for my motherboard on Mercury's site but it only contained minor fixes. In fact, there was a direct link from their website to esupport who Mercury say now provide the latest flash upgrades for their m/b. So the implication was that if u want the very latest u have to pay. As I paid by credit card I can get a refund if i dont get it working. Ive plenty of evidence from them that they guarantee 100% success. It may be a rip off but i doubt it because of the number/speed of support emails they have sent me. Having said that, it still doesn't work Any idea why my BIOS (new and old) can see all of a 60G drive but only about 32G of a 120G drive. Could there be any remnants of the DDO hanging around? Thanks again for taking time to reply and ur help. Nigel 1st, Apollo suggested you clear the BIOS jumper after switching off and isolating from the mains - this you must do to evidence the fact that your BIOS flash does not contain any residual ****e from the previous BIOS info. But . . . . before clearing the BIOS unplug all drives including the one your having trouble with and re-boot so that the BIOS finds no [ none ] drives. 2nd, The Seagate ' tool ' did work ' for a few days ' so your BIOS was able to see the whole drive. These various manufacturers can / do put a hidden interpreter file in the boot sector and other places maybe of the drive which is read on boot, though I have no experience of them personally. Get, beg, borrow a bootable Partition Magic v8.0 or later and get rid of anything that seagate or Fdisk has done to your drive. Now what is the status ? BoroLad "Apollo" wrote in message ... "Lago Jardin" wrote in message . .. Hi Im not sure if its OK to post this here but its very tecky so I hope someone may be able to help me. Sorry if its a little off topic. My Boot drive is 60G and my old BIOS saw that OK and Fdisk partitioned it OKsome time ago. For extra storage. I bought a Seagate 120G drive and my then present BIOS would not see more than 32,248M of the new drive. I then used Seagate's DDO which worked OK for a few days and it did enable me to format and use the whole drive. However, after a while, new, large, garbled, phantom folders began appearing. They could not be deleted. It was not possible to use either scandisk or defrag on the drive because of the DDO. I decided to remove the DDO with Seagate tools and go for a BIOS flash upgrade. I went to www.esupport.com and a link on their website tested my old BIOS and said that an upgrade was available which would support up to 512G drives. It was specifically designed for my motherboard. It cost about £14. WTF, you don't pay for bios updates, ver 1.1a is available here; http://snipurl.com/704h This looks like the latest version available, I wish I could sell bios updates by email, LOL. The flash was sent in an email with full instructions and was very easy. Unfortunately, the new BIOS still only showed the same disk drive space as the old one. Even using Fdisk (the one in ME which supports larger drives), it could only see and partition 32,248M of the new drive (100% used as primary dos partition). E-support have tried to help, via many emails, with this problem. They argue that I must be doing something wrong because the new BIOS sees the full 60G of my Boot drive (as did my old BIOS) and therefore it cannot be faulty. All cables are connected correctly. The new drive is set as secondary master. The jumpers are all correct on all devices. There is no limit jumper on the new drive. I have even disconnected all other drives/CD/DVD and tried the new drive as Primary Master but the BIOS still only sees 32,248M. I have read every Microsoft article about large drives in ME but this cannot be a Windows issue anyway, can it? I have the newest chipset drives from my motherboard manufacturer. My IDE controller should support large drives. Why can my old and new BIOS see the full extent of a 60G drive but only 32,248M of a 120G drive. E-support say this is impossible. They say it must see 60G in both and should see all of the 120G drive. I can only say that they have tried very hard to resolve this. I don't want to return my new BIOS flash and get a refund because im just back where I started. Demand a refund now, it doesn't work, and even if it did how are they going to know that you've got it installed. Get the FREE official bios from Kobian and re-flash it anyway, it definately sounds like a bios issue, but the fact that it recognises your 60GB drive is confusing. I can't remember what sizes can give problems, but almost everything from the last couple of years should recognise upto IIRC 138GB, then you need LBA48 support (?) for drives larger than this. If they've hacked around with the bios, even just to change the description, then I wouldn't trust it to be stable. There are people who hack bioses, but they are competant programmers/hackers, and their efforts are excellent. Any ideas please so that I can pass them to E-support. Tell them that they are robbing *******s ;o) On a more serious note, please don't take offence from my post it's just that I've never heard of anyone paying for a bios, bios-chip perhaps after corruption etc., but not a bios file freely available. Try going into the bios, (hopefully the official 1.1b), and auto detecting the drives again, or try setting it manually in the bios. HTH -- Ian --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.703 / Virus Database: 459 - Release Date: 10/06/2004 |
#8
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Hi
The only m/b jumper i have is a clear CMOS jumper. I understand the difference between BIOS & CMOS but do u think that i should try ur idea but clear CMOS? Thanks Nigel wrote in message ... On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 13:20:41 GMT, "Lago Jardin" wrote: 1st, Apollo suggested you clear the BIOS jumper after switching off and isolating from the mains - this you must do to evidence the fact that your BIOS flash does not contain any residual ****e from the previous BIOS info. But . . . . before clearing the BIOS unplug all drives including the one your having trouble with and re-boot so that the BIOS finds no [ none ] drives. 2nd, The Seagate ' tool ' did work ' for a few days ' so your BIOS was able to see the whole drive. These various manufacturers can / do put a hidden interpreter file in the boot sector and other places maybe of the drive which is read on boot, though I have no experience of them personally. Get, beg, borrow a bootable Partition Magic v8.0 or later and get rid of anything that seagate or Fdisk has done to your drive. Now what is the status ? BoroLad /2004 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.703 / Virus Database: 459 - Release Date: 10/06/2004 |
#9
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"Lago Jardin" wrote in message . .. Hi The only m/b jumper i have is a clear CMOS jumper. I understand the difference between BIOS & CMOS but do u think that i should try ur idea but clear CMOS? Yes, flash the bios, then clear the cmos. The bios holds the mobo startup programme and the cmos holds the settings and, as borolad says, info about your hardware, ie drive heads/cylinders etc. -- Ian |
#10
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On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 10:53:33 +0100, "Apollo"
wrote: "Lago Jardin" wrote in message ... Hi The only m/b jumper i have is a clear CMOS jumper. I understand the difference between BIOS & CMOS but do u think that i should try ur idea but clear CMOS? Yes, flash the bios, then clear the cmos. The bios holds the mobo startup programme and the cmos holds the settings and, as borolad says, info about your hardware, ie drive heads/cylinders etc. Cough !, don't ! [ again ] flash the CMOS / BIOS just ' clear ' it for 5_to_10 minutes whilst ' off mains '. Let us know what happens please BoroLad Correct me please, you have already flashed the BIOS once - yes ? |
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