Maxtor Hard Drive and Bios woes

[albaguy69]

A guy asked me to upgrade his PC by replacing his existing 6GB Hard Drive with a Maxtor DiamondMax 60GB Hard Drive.
I explained to him that because of the age of his PC his BIOS might limit his hard drive to 8GB. His PC is a P2-233 and motherboard is 1998 era.
Anyway, I set the new hard drive up as a master but no matter what the BIOS would not recognise it. In the Maxtor hard drive guide it states "If the system hangs during the boot process after installing the Maxtor Hard Drive - either before or after setting the system BIOS - the system may have a BIOS with a cylinder limitation".
It then gives the option to change the jumper settings on the hard drive to work with systems with cylinder limitations.
Anyway, I set the new hard drive jumper settings. Everything now works fine but now the system is only recognising a maximum of 32GB's of his 60GB total.

I've never heard of "BIOS hard drive cylinder limitations". Can anyone clarify things?

The end note anyway is I've told him to purchase a Duron 800 with approriate motherboard and memory.

[PMich]

The cheaper route would be for him to buy a controller card with its own BIOS that would recognize the drive.

PMich

[Mr N8]

You could also fdisk, and create 2 30GB partitions to utilize all of the space.

Nate

[albaguy69]

No can do. It's only allowing x amount of cylinders of the hard drive to be used and therefore only allowing 32GB to be used. The rest magically disappears.

As for the previous comment, it's a slow old PC so in my opinion an upgrade is a neccessity, considering he's also bought a new CD-ReWriter which says "minimum P2-300 required".

Thanks for the advice guys but I'm looking for information regarding BIOS hard drive cylinder limitations.

[junodave]

albaguy69-
Looks like you are experiencing problems very similar to what I went through. My motherboard is a little older than the one you are talking about though (ASUS P/I-P55T2P4). I installed a Promise Ultra ATA 100 card and a Maxtor 30Gb HD. I couldn't get it running quite right until I realized that the jumper setting is different for Award BIOS (again cylinder limitation). Once I got that straightened out the thing ran flawlessly. The newer BIOS that came on the controller card made all of the difference. I'm going to second the suggestion by PMich -- get a good controller card! They are not that expensive and are worth everything you spend on them. If I didn't have a vacant PCI slot, I'd toss something else out. I don't know for sure, but I'll bet the newer ATA 133 cards have BIOS that will run the new monster HDs.

By the way, does the motherboard you are working on support anything faster than ATA33? Just curious.

Good luck.
Dave

[mike breck]

Hi albaguy69,

I just bought a Promise ATA100 controller from my local PC shop and it cost £35.

http://www.creativecomputing.net/

It was for a P200mx with a new Maxtor 20GB HD.

Setup was easy.

HTH

[Werewolfdaddy]

If your friend has the money, it would be best for him to come on into the age of the gigahert. He will thank himself later. If money is an issue, he can get quality used parts through the members of this forum or by keeping a vigilant eye out for bargains. I built my girlfriend a nice computer for about 400 US dollars.
1 gig celleron $75, I think that this was actually 50, but can't remember for sure.
p6proa+ mb $30, bought from Jenni
(2)256mb sdram $70, on sale at best buy
3D prophet 4500 $75 was actually free, but was a replacement for a lower grade video card that didn't work from Hercules
40gig hd $75 on sale at Best Buy
Keyboard and mouse $20 wal-mart
ethernet and modem $25 bought both used from local computer shop
sb16 isa $20 , i bought this from a member of the forum ,but can't remember who.
A little creative consumerism can lead to happiness.