Is there a BIOS or chipset frontier for hard disk sizes between 20 and 80 GB?

J

Jean Castonguay

It is a Vtech motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 HX chipset and an
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG (09/25/997-i430HX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).

With a Western Digital WD200 (20 GB) hard disk it works.
If I replace the WD200 with a WD800 (80 GB), and I go to the IDE HDD
AUTODETECTION, no hard disk is detected!

The WD800 works OK on other machines.

What could be wrong? I am aware of «frontiers» at 8 GB and 128 GB,
but I have never seen anything about one between 20 and 80 GB!

Thank you very much for your help.
 
B

Bob Knowlden

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

I quote from it:

______________________________________________________________

The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GB / 33.8 GB) Barrier

This barrier is relatively recent, and along with a couple of others began
showing up during the spring and summer of 1999. Although this barrier is
often referred to as the 32 GB barrier similar to the one immediately above,
that description is a bit of a misnomer.

This particular barrier is caused by some versions of the Award BIOS not
being able to handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. Most hard
disk parameters use 16 heads and 63 sectors, which works out to a capacity
of approximately 33.8 GB or 31.5 GB. It is our understanding that on or
about June of 1999, this problem had been corrected by Award. This is
somewhat of an unusual barrier given that most, if not all, hard disks above
8 GB no longer use discrete geometry for access, instead Logical Block
Addressing is used along with a flat sector number from 0 to one less than
the number of sectors on the drive. No doubt this 65,536 cylinder problem
must somehow be related to some older code that was being used, or a
compatibility issue with older hard drives (or both). From everything we
have been able to examine, this issue was limited to a few machines that
relied upon old Award BIOS code that was subsequently corrected with an
update.

______________________________________________________________

I don't know if this is the explanation for your problem. The author of the
above seems to state that the problem arose because Award was using some old
code - in 1999! Perhaps your 1997 BIOS isn't compatible with a drive size
that didn't become common until five or six years later.

Something is a bit strange, though. According to the usually reliable
http://www.wimsbios.com/, 2A59I is a code for a 430TX chipset rather than an
HX (2A59F). V3 is indeed the code for Vtech, although I see no PC support
stuff at their web site. Wim's BIOS pages claims that they're the same as PC
Partners, http://www.pcpartner.com/. The only HX board that PC Partners
lists has an AMI BIOS, not one from Award. There are some TX boards with an
Award BIOS listed. There are mainboard ID numbers provided there, and I hope
that one of them is yours. However, the newest BIOSes listed for the TX
boards (TX was the latest 430 series chipset, I believe) date from 1998.

You might be able to add a HD of arbitrary size by adding on an IDE
controller card
(http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID HBAs&product_id=11),
which I've seen for sale for less than $20 (US). That may be too much to
spend on an old Pentium 1 system, though.

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
S

Scott Alfter

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jean Castonguay said:
It is a Vtech motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 HX chipset and an
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG (09/25/997-i430HX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).

With a Western Digital WD200 (20 GB) hard disk it works.
If I replace the WD200 with a WD800 (80 GB), and I go to the IDE HDD
AUTODETECTION, no hard disk is detected!
The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GB / 33.8 GB) Barrier

[...]

You might be able to add a HD of arbitrary size by adding on an IDE
controller card
(http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID HBAs&product_id=11),
which I've seen for sale for less than $20 (US). That may be too much to
spend on an old Pentium 1 system, though.

There's probably a jumper on the drive that will set it to show up as <32GB.
Once that's in place, use the BIOS overlay software provided with the drive
to access the drive's full capacity. I had to do this recently with a 40GB
drive in an old 233-MHz Pentium-MMX box. The overlay doesn't interfere with
most OSes (this system had Linux installed on it), and newer ones might even
add CD-boot capability to an older computer that didn't originally support
it.

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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iD8DBQFCQncfVgTKos01OwkRAoJ5AJ4wfSG9E9oZvi2jf75qXJa7DkUA7wCdHf+R
FsFKdcDdNw9Gm0CbGB9+yNQ=
=KE2/
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L

larry moe 'n curly

Jean said:
It is a Vtech motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 HX chipset and an
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG (09/25/997-i430HX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).

With a Western Digital WD200 (20 GB) hard disk it works.
If I replace the WD200 with a WD800 (80 GB), and I go to the IDE HDD
AUTODETECTION, no hard disk is detected!

The WD800 works OK on other machines.

www.wimsbios.com has a forum dedicated just to HD size problems, and
some of the people there will even patch your Award ver. 4.51 so it can
handle HDs as large as 137GB. www.rainbow-software.org may also be
able to help -- he patched two BIOSes for me.

Some mobos won't boot even with a patched BIOS because apparently Award
4.51 doesn't handle ATA/66 and faster HDs properly, regardless of their
size. If that occurs, run WD's utility to reprogram the HD so that its
maximum transfer rate is ATA/33.

A PCI HD controller card will not just solve all your problems but it
will also support HDs as large as a million times 137GB and add allow
older versions of Windows (ME, 98, 98SE) to address all of that
capacity.
 
K

keith

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jean Castonguay said:
It is a Vtech motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 HX chipset and an
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG (09/25/997-i430HX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).

With a Western Digital WD200 (20 GB) hard disk it works.
If I replace the WD200 with a WD800 (80 GB), and I go to the IDE HDD
AUTODETECTION, no hard disk is detected!
The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GB / 33.8 GB) Barrier

[...]

You might be able to add a HD of arbitrary size by adding on an IDE
controller card
(http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID HBAs&product_id=11),
which I've seen for sale for less than $20 (US). That may be too much to
spend on an old Pentium 1 system, though.

There's probably a jumper on the drive that will set it to show up as <32GB.
Once that's in place, use the BIOS overlay software provided with the drive
to access the drive's full capacity. I had to do this recently with a 40GB
drive in an old 233-MHz Pentium-MMX box. The overlay doesn't interfere with
most OSes (this system had Linux installed on it), and newer ones might even
add CD-boot capability to an older computer that didn't originally support
it.

This is a *BAD* plan. Once that "overlay" program is in place that drive
and its contents will forever be married to that system. You're *much*
better off buying an IDE add-in adapter card ($10ish) that understands the
larger drives.
 
J

Jean Castonguay

It is a Vtech motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 HX chipset and an
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG (09/25/997-i430HX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).
Correction:
It is a PC Partner motherboard equipped with an Intel 430 TX chipset
and an Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG
(09/25/97-i430TX-SMC699-2A59IV3FC-00).

I replaced this BIOS with one dated July 20, 1998, and the problem
persists. This is in agreement with the BIOS FAQ in the WIMBIOS site.
 
K

KURIAKI

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