HD too large to handle

[¤jº~¥Á±Ú]

I have a new 120g Maxtor HD, when I connect it to an old Abit BX mother
board, it will not recognize the HD, after a number of trys, it finally
recognizes the HD only as "Slave", and the jumper has to set to CS (cable
selection).

The problem does not stop here, the system BIOS only recognizes the HD at
size 32g, not 120g, I understand this is the limit of old mother board Abit
BX, so I say fine, 32g is big enough for me. But when I try to format the
HD, it says this is a bad disk and can not be formatted.

My question is, do this normally happen when a HD is too large to handle by
an old mother board?

 

[spodosaurus]

I have a new 120g Maxtor HD, when I connect it to an old Abit BX mother
board, it will not recognize the HD, after a number of trys, it finally
recognizes the HD only as "Slave", and the jumper has to set to CS (cable
selection).

The problem does not stop here, the system BIOS only recognizes the HD at
size 32g, not 120g, I understand this is the limit of old mother board Abit
BX, so I say fine, 32g is big enough for me. But when I try to format the
HD, it says this is a bad disk and can not be formatted.

My question is, do this normally happen when a HD is too large to handle by
an old mother board?

A google search would have answered your question. There are BIOS limits
to hard drive size (8G, 32G, etc) that have been surpassed as
motherboard and hard drive technology has progressed. Often there are
more up-to-date BIOSes that were made specifically to correct this flaw
for older boards (but not every manufacturer made these BIOSes available
or made them available for all their products). There are three
potential solutions for you:
1. there's usually a jumper on the hard drive itself that allows you to
restrict its size to 32G. Read the writing on your hard drive or go to
the manufacturer's website and look up the details.
2. update your motherboard BIOS. If you're lucky, the manufacturer will
have put out an updated BIOS for your board that will allow it to get
around the 32GB limit.
3. buy an IDE expansion card and connect the drive to this.

A potential fourth solution (one that I have no experience with) is
drive overlay software provided from the hard disk drive manufacturer to
get around these limits. However, if the computer is having trouble even
POSTing with the drive attached this may not even be an option.

HTH,

Ari


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[Jan Alter]

I guess so.

You do know you have options.
1. Look for an updated bios to flash your board
2. Add a Promise PCI IDE interface card that will read the higher size disk
accurately.
3. Add free software from the hdd's manufacturer to have the bios recognize
the additional size (not the best option, but I've used it with a couple of
my drives for years on older boards without trouble though others will swear
against it).

 

[JAD]

right off CS is not a good jumper setting- master(lone drive) or
slave or master with a slave

 

[Bob Knowlden]

Assuming you have a BX6, you may be able to fix things with a newer BIOS:

http://www2.abit.com.tw/page/en/dow...oard&pTITLE_ON_SCREEN=BX6&pSOCKET_TYPE=Slot+1

(link may wrap)

The MX BIOS is supposed to support drives 40 GB and larger. (The page
doesn't give an upper limit.)

The newest BIOS listed is:

ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/download/fae//bx6qs.exe

As BIOS updates are cumulative, you may as well go wit that one.

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[none]

I have a new 120g Maxtor HD, when I connect it to an old Abit BX mother
board, it will not recognize the HD, after a number of trys, it finally
recognizes the HD only as "Slave", and the jumper has to set to CS (cable
selection).

The problem does not stop here, the system BIOS only recognizes the HD at
size 32g, not 120g, I understand this is the limit of old mother board Abit
BX, so I say fine, 32g is big enough for me. But when I try to format the
HD, it says this is a bad disk and can not be formatted.

My question is, do this normally happen when a HD is too large to handle by
an old mother board?

Sure, that's why you have to partition it off in 32gb chunks.
depending on your OS you'll have to go into fdisk and set up several
partitions to get the full use of that big drive.
Sometimes the mobo maker will offer a patch or bios update to fix the
problem tho' older os's willl ultimately limit what the drive will be
seen as.