Bios Weirdities

[Becky]

I have a somewhat older Via motherboard (P4PA), but the bios did
recognize large drives correctly. I recently did a clean install of
Win98SE and Windows XP SP2 and am certain the drive sizes were correct
in the bios. My system is dual boot with 98 having been installed
first on the C partition (Fat32) and WinXP SP2 on the D partition
(NTFS) as the default boot OS. I've slowly been adding drivers and
programs to the installation with relatively few problems. Today I
notice the bios is no longer recognizing the drives correctly. A
Western Digital 250 GB (master) and a Maxtor 160 GB (slave) both show
only 137 GB in the bios. XP still recognizes them correctly. I then
installed the Western Digital Data Lifeguard software in hopes of
resolving the problem, and much to my surprise, when the installation
completed it informed me it needed to enable large drive support in
the registry and reboot in order to continue. I thought that was a
default setting in SP1 and SP2???? I've trolled around the web
endlessly and found nothing that seems to address this. I did flash
the bios to the most current version to no avail. I also ran the
Western Digital diagnostics on the master drive which indicate there
are no problems with it. There is no drive overlay software installed
either. Does anyone have any ideas about what could have made the
changes to the system and/or how to restore the bios to it's original
functionality? A second question as an aside would be am I worrying
needlessly about this and should I just leave well enough alone since
the system isn't exhibiting any instability? I know enough to be
dangerous but am really over my head when it comes to understanding
how and what the bios interacts with when detecting hardware during
the boot process. Any help/suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.

Becky

 

[MsOsWin]

(e-mail address removed) (Becky) in

I have a somewhat older Via motherboard (P4PA), but the bios did
recognize large drives correctly.

during this past era, was this bios upgrade or original bios? "large" equaled larger than 137gb? running Win98? I ask, cuz I
thought that Win98 couldn't see past 137 without overlay software?

Any help/suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.

um,, I recently researched this a lot because I was trying to choose between two 2000-era computers in which to install a >137
GB HD. eventually I upgraded bios to 48bit LBA version and bought XP sp2 upgrade.

in a reply to my post, someone said that Win2k doesn't work well with disk overlay software (implying that XP might also not
do well with disc overlay?) maybe your Win98 is fine with the overlay, but XP wrecked the overlay? in other words, if you ran
only XP, you wouldn't have ever installed the overlay software. or am I mistakenly assuming that you did install overlay
software? I think the Win98 seeing only FAT32 space might complicate determining space that's usable to Win98. I recall
reading that partitions did *nothing* to cure windows max GB limitations. you either need a Win98 capable of seeing the sum
of partitions (or proper SP in the case of win 2000 ... I think sp3 is the oldest SP to see >137gb)


still this doesn't explain why *the BIOS* can no longer see past 137gb!

maybe you should be glad that only the BIOS is not seeing your HD space beyond 137gb. otherwise, if win no longer sees all
the space, data might disappear. waaaaa! :-(


is it possible that BIOS upgrades aren't reliable?

maybe you could ask about this in homebuilt, motherboard or storage newsgroups?


also, maybe irrelevant to your problem, but... why not ditch Win98?