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HD autodetect troubles


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#1
Indiana Red

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Rebuilding this old P2 450 and putting in a new WD 80G
I have an XP disk ready t install and a floppy that will get me to a DOS prompt
FDISK reports no fixed drives and trying to chage to D: so I can run "setup" gives me "invalid drive"
So, restart, F2 for BIOS and choosing the IDE setup catagory it freezes at "Auto-Detecting Primary Master"

I have the HDD not jumpered per the sticker on the HD that says this is the master setting when there are no "slaves" present.
I have had it on the end and on teh "middle" IDE cable connector and have tried a couple differet power leads.
I have also swaped IDE cables from the one that the CD is using
It does spin up when the PC starts up.

The CD is on the secondary IDE

If I disconnect the power or the IDE cable from the HD the BIOS will imediately offer to skip this drive and puts all zeros in the cyl/sectors/heads etc fields
So it sees something there when its connected but just gets stuck recognizing what it is.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
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#2
Samm

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Welcome to G2G

Sounds to me like your motherboard may have a drive capacity limit of 32GB. In other words, the 80GB drive is simply too large for the bios to recognise.
If you know the make/model of the motherboard, you should be able to go to the manufacturers website to check this & also see if there is a bios update available that will allow the motherboard to recognise larger drives.

Even if the bios is able to recognise the full 80GB, the version of fdisk that comes on a win9x boot disk, can't cope with anything above 63GB.

If the bios is the problem, & no update is available to fix it, there are other options :
The drive may have a 32GB clip (i.e. jumper setting) that will restrict the addressable drive size to 32GB.
You should be able to use overlay software (should be one available on WD's website) which will allow the bios to use the full capacity of the drive
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#3
Fenor

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It's possible that your motherboard doesn't support a harddrive that big. What is the model # of your motherboard?

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#4
Fenor

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Welcome to G2G

Sounds to me like your motherboard may have a drive capacity limit of 32GB. In other words, the 80GB drive is simply too large for the bios to recognise.
If you know the make/model of the motherboard, you should be able to go to the manufacturers website to check this & also see if there is a bios update available that will allow the motherboard to recognise larger drives.

Even if the bios is able to recognise the full 80GB, the version of fdisk that comes on a win9x boot disk, can't cope with anything above 63GB.

If the bios is the problem, & no update is available to fix it, there are other options :
The drive may have a 32GB clip (i.e. jumper setting) that will restrict the addressable drive size to 32GB.
You should be able to use overlay software (should be one available on WD's website) which will allow the bios to use the full capacity of the drive

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Great minds think alike. :tazz:

Fenor
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#5
Fenor

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Rebuilding this old P2 450 and putting in a new WD 80G
I have an XP disk ready t install and a floppy that will get me to a DOS prompt

Just curious, but why are you bothering with using a windows 98 boot disk when you can just run setup directly off the Windows XP CD? Just set the bios to boot off the CD-ROM first and put the CD in, reboot the computer and when it says to 'Press any key to boot from cd,' press a key and setup will begin.

Fenor
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#6
Indiana Red

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Just curious, but why are you bothering with using a windows 98 boot disk when you can just run setup directly off the Windows XP CD?  Just set the bios to boot off the CD-ROM first and put the CD in, reboot the computer and when it says to 'Press any key to boot from cd,' press a key and setup will begin.

Fenor

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Well, I cant get the drives recognized and lettered so telling BIOS the boot order of D,C,Floppy for example doesn't help me. I've tried boot orders that start with D and E and it just continues on the the floppy. But atleaset it will read that, thats why I though of using that boot disk to get to DOS

The max HD size is a possibility as this is a DR737 MB that was stock in this 5 year old micron. I see some info out there but dont se anything that states its max HD size.

Thanks for the quick replys and the good info
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#7
Samm

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The boot priority order of D, C, Floppy, is for booting from a second hard drive (D) not the CDROM drive. If the boot order doesn't give an option that actually states CDROM, then it doesn't support bootable CDs.

Finding out on the internet what the largest size of drive is that a board this old will support, is always close to impossible. I am fairly certain though given the age of the board, that 80GB is too large.

Like I said before however, you may be able to get round this by using overlay software.
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#8
Indiana Red

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OK Thanks
I will bump down to a smaller HDand try that. It will be on a LAn here so network shares will do for stroage.
Thanks for your help.
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