PCA Forums

Picked up a dualie rig from b-man and bought a 250g hard drive for it. The only problem is that the bios dont see all of the drive and neither does windows. Only 130g or so. Any Ideas? Bios upgrade?

You will probably have to install PCI to IDE card to recognize the larger drive.. If the bios doesn't see it all.. If you have any questions about it, feel free to PM me. I know a lot about that setup..

eGo

um what OS? if XP you need sp1 maybe sp2 (I dont remember) also what board and bios revision? Is there a newer one?

Greg

No an older one, actually I think it came from ego originly. S2460, dual athlon mp's. And yes XP with sp2

I cant think of any athlon board that wouldnt support that size HD.

Greg

It's the 48bit LBA limitation, which caps you at 137Gb. Either the controller doesn't support 48bit LBA, the BIOS or the OS.

XP SP2 does support it so it's probably the controller.

Try updating the BIOS first but you'll probably need to buy a PCI ATA133 controller to get 48bit LBA support.

You will probably need to repartition the drive afterwards. Not sure though.

Thanx, gonna check on a newer bios. I think this one is pretty old. If I do have to get a pci eide card, can I still keep the OS on that drive?

You may have to do a repair install.

You can install the IDE card first (with no drive connected to it). Once it's installed and the Window drivers are installed for it, you can USUALLY connect the drive to it and it'll boot. If not, you need to do a repair install.

HOWEVER the real issue is that since the drive was partitioned when BIOS didn't see the entire drive, that Windows will probably not see the whole drive until you delete all the partitions and re-create them.

If you still want to keep the current OS install then what I recommend is to install the IDE card and windows drivers for it, then make a Ghost or Acronis image of the entire drive, then delete all the partitions on the drive (while it's still connected to the onboard IDE). Then connect the drive to the add-on card, make sure BIOS sees the entire drive, and restore the image.

Well lucky for me I havent put anthing but an OS on the drive and that is no biggie. I have the latest bios installed so I guess I will have to get a card to make it work. There is a lot of parameters that I can change but none that affect LBA. Anyone got a card they wanna part with????


Im quite surprised by this older combination, very quick considering the age of the technology.

Surprisingly you only have to go back a few years to get this issue. 48bit LBA is a fairly recent thing. Up until a couple of years ago drives over 120Gb were uncommon. For a while, Maxtor used to include a 48bit LBA card with any drive bigger than 120Gb. I remember buying a few.

Use XP SP1 or Sp2, and you won't have the issue. But the installation CD has to have them integrated into it; ugprading afterwards won't work.

I'm running a 160gb HD on a BX440 MB and the BIOS only picks up the HD as a 137gb.... XP Pro SP2 detects it properly @ 160gb.

SP2 alone doesn't and can't help if your hardware is not 48-bit LBA compliant.

VIPERONI, not sure why your BIOS isn't seeing it correctly unless LBA is disabled in BIOS. Windows overrides BIOS so if you have LBA disabled in BIOS Windows will enable it.

In Key Keeper's case it's strictly a hardware issue. He's already running SP2 and it doesn't help.

Ordered a card today to cure this problem. Promise SATAII 150 TX2plus.

Just hope I can boot from it. Im sure I will have to format and install the drivers during setup "F6blah.blah.blah"

In the boot options in BIOS make sure you have SCSI or OTHER selected as the primary boot device before IDE.