P5A MB will not recognize WD ATA 80GB drive

[Hugh Hardie]

I purchased a WD ATA 80GB drive. My P5A motherboard will not recognize
it.

The drive is recognized on two other machines. The P5A MB has been
flashed with the latest BIOS. The cable from one of the machines which
recognized the drive was used in the P5A MB and the drive was not
recognized.

The driver is jumpered as Master and there is no other drive on the
cable.

I subsequently purchased a WD ATA 40GB drive and it is recognized in
the P5A machine.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Hugh

 

[Paul]

I purchased a WD ATA 80GB drive. My P5A motherboard will not recognize
it.

The drive is recognized on two other machines. The P5A MB has been
flashed with the latest BIOS. The cable from one of the machines which
recognized the drive was used in the P5A MB and the drive was not
recognized.

The driver is jumpered as Master and there is no other drive on the
cable.

I subsequently purchased a WD ATA 40GB drive and it is recognized in
the P5A machine.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Hugh

This says up to 128GB works with the latest BIOS.
http://www.asuscom.de/support/FAQ/faq076_32gb_ide_hdd.htm

This is the latest beta BIOS 1011.005.
http://www.asuscom.de/pub/ASUS/mb/sock7/ali/p5a/1011-005.zip

WD disk jumpering is different than other brands. I'm not certain,
but perhaps removing all jumpers corresponds to a master device
alone on the cable.

HTH,
Paul

 

[DaveW]

Sounds like your motherboard's BIOS can only recognize up to 40GB. That's
the problem with using older motherboards.

 

[Tim]

Follow Paul's advice and try the WD drive on cable select.
- Tim

 

[Michael J. Apollyon]

I purchased a WD ATA 80GB drive. My P5A motherboard

will not recognize it. [..snip..]
I subsequently purchased a WD ATA 40GB drive and it
is recognized in the P5A machine.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Hugh

Hugh,

You may be better off with a new controller such as any of
Promise Ultra series.

My P5A-B was very fussy about newer hard drives before I popped
in an Utra100... Performance is better than the onboard ALi
controller as well.

 

[Robert B. Clark]

Sounds like your motherboard's BIOS can only recognize up to 40GB. That's
the problem with using older motherboards.

No, I have an IBM 75GB drive running on my P5A, with the latest beta
BIOS as reported by Paul up-thread.

I don't recall off-hand if I jumpered the drive as M/S or CS.

 

[C. Stuart McKendrick, III]

Glad to har that someone else is still running this board. Good to know the
HDD info as well. Which cpu are you running, Hugh?

I purchased a WD ATA 80GB drive. My P5A motherboard
will not recognize it. [..snip..]
I subsequently purchased a WD ATA 40GB drive and it
is recognized in the P5A machine.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Hugh

Hugh,

You may be better off with a new controller such as any of
Promise Ultra series.

My P5A-B was very fussy about newer hard drives before I popped
in an Utra100... Performance is better than the onboard ALi
controller as well.

 

[Patrick Dunford]

I purchased a WD ATA 80GB drive. My P5A motherboard will not recognize
it.

The drive is recognized on two other machines. The P5A MB has been
flashed with the latest BIOS. The cable from one of the machines which
recognized the drive was used in the P5A MB and the drive was not
recognized.

The driver is jumpered as Master and there is no other drive on the
cable.

I subsequently purchased a WD ATA 40GB drive and it is recognized in
the P5A machine.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

The P5A is a very old design now dating from about 1997 or so. Could
there be a Bios inherent limitation on this new very large drive.

 

[Beemer Biker]

The P5A is a very old design now dating from about 1997 or so. Could
there be a Bios inherent limitation on this new very large drive.

It was the top of the line super-socket-7. It was better than an intel
P3-550 if you could find those K6+550 chips. Up until last year, the XBox
was not much faster. I have run win2k and XP with full acpi on my P5A and
P4AB with atx power and I had those K6+ chips. With beta bios both those
motherboards will support 128gb. Both systems have been passed on to
nephews but are still running and stable.

 

[C.L. Wong]

It was the top of the line super-socket-7. It was better than an intel
P3-550 if you could find those K6+550 chips. Up until last year, the XBox
was not much faster. I have run win2k and XP with full acpi on my P5A and
P4AB with atx power and I had those K6+ chips. With beta bios both those
motherboards will support 128gb. Both systems have been passed on to
nephews but are still running and stable.

I agree. I have a P5A-B running an AMD K6-III-400 CPU on Win98.

While using the Bios version 1010, I discovered that it would not
recognize a 80GB hard disk; the maximum size it would recognize was a
60GB hard disk.

However, after flashing it to the Bios version 1011 beta 005, it will
recognize a 80 hard disk. In fact, I am now running it with a Maxtor
80GB IDE hard disk.

The P5A-B is a very stable motherboard, probably the best Super Socket
7 motherboard that I have ever used; and I have used many, with the
Ali Aladdin-5 chipset, the VIA MVP-3 chipset and the SIS-530 chipset.

 

[Patrick Dunford]

It was the top of the line super-socket-7. It was better than an intel
P3-550 if you could find those K6+550 chips. Up until last year, the XBox
was not much faster.

I'd wager that the K6-2 350 with this board is slower than a Pentium II
350.

 

[Beemer Biker]

I'd wager that the K6-2 350 with this board is slower than a Pentium II
350.

Yep, you are absolutely correct, only the K6 III and the "3+" chips had
that large internal cache and ran at 0 wait state. The few + chips that AMD
made were originally destined for the SBC & PC104 type market and were
engineering sample quantities, very hard to get. The "2+:" was better than
your K6-2 and would be comparable to a celeron rather than a true P2 They
wanted people to move to the K7 and IMHO purposely did not make enough of
them. The + were low power and I picked up 2 of those 3+450 the first time
I saw them on the market. A couple of weeks later, they were all gone and
people were re-selling theirs on ebay. They are still available
occasionally http://www.softwareandstuff.com/cpu.html but not all P5 boards
will take them. Unaccountably, the later model P5 mombos had problems.