Page 1 of New hard drive + Old BIOS = AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHH

I have just spent the most frustrating Saturday ever attempting to fit a new 40Gb hard drive to my lowly PC system. After hours of twatting about making boot disks, defragging the old 1.2 gig drives, twatting about inside the case trying to discover which hard drive was which, gingerly powering up a few times with bits disconnected, and plugging the new one in, I switched on to find.... it won`t autodetect my lovely new drive.

Much swearing later, I discovered the following tiny bit of text in the back of the instruction manual: "Award BIOS version 4.51PG has a known 32GB capacity limitation". Well, thanks a f***ing bunch, Award, Maxtor.

Fortunately, I had done some detective work last week to find out what make my motherboard is. It`s a Microstar MS-5129 v1.2. Unfortunately, there hasn`t been a BIOS upgrade for this since 28/1/1997. (My BIOS appears to have been upgraded since then anyway, with a Unicore BIOS dated 1999).

I`ve contacted Unicore to see if they can supply a more recent BIOS upgrade to fix the problem, but I have a feeling they`re going to try and sell it to me. Short of buying a new motherboard/memory/processor/OS/case just to get the feckin` hard drive working, can anyone offer any advice on getting a free BIOS upgrade?!? I`ve never done this sort of thing before and frankly it scares the s*** out of me. Also I am losing my sanity and feel an overwhelming urge to take a dump on my motherboard and throw the whole lot out the window.

you could try putting in the details of the hard disk manually, you need the number of heads, sectors and access mode i think. It probably won`t help but it`s worth a go.

The problem is that the mobo is atleast 6 years old now so it`s very much end of line.

Try searching some of the hard drive sites as im sure maxtor for one have a disk format-partition program you can download to format and partition you drive into say two parts.Then i think your bios will accept it
Try
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

The likes of Seagate etc provide software called drive manager which loads a couple of files during startup which fools the system into recognising the correct size of the h/d. Have you tried getting in touch with microstar? http://www.msi.com.tw

Try using Maxtor maxblast plus from here http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=508 It creares a bootable floppy and walks you through reformating all sizes of harddrive. I have tried a previous version on maxtor and other harddrives and it works a treat.

Tried putting the hard drive details in manually.

Haven`t contacted MSI directly yet, but I suspect there won`t be an official BIOS upgrade from them - as you say it is very much a legacy board, and there hasn`t been a BIOS update since 1997 according to their site.

More arsing around and investigation discovered that the Maxtor Maxblast 3 software is indeed capable of making the drive work with the BIOS and still be able to use all 40GB of storage. Unfortunately the damn software won`t load.... I found that if I set the Cylinder Limitation Jumper on the drive, the BIOS will auto-detect it as a 32GB drive. This is where the Maxtor software on the bootable floppy is supposed to jump in. Unfortunately, it gets so far loading up, then dumps me back to the command prompt with a "Command not recognized" followed by "Batch files nested too deeply" error. At this point the keyboard very nearly flew out the window. I have wasted an entire day on this, and cut my thumb in the guts of my PC. Not a happy bunny!

Thanks for all your help so far though, I hate waiting on emails from manufacturers, it`s nice to have knowledgeable people to bitch about the problem with!

Justa thought - would it work if you partitioned it into 2 20gb partitions on a different pc and then put the hard disc in?

On the back of your Maxtor drive is a jumper position that will default the
drive to a maximum of 32GB - set this jumper & your BIOS should see the drive

This item was edited on Tuesday, 17th June 2003, 10:47

"I found that if I set the Cylinder Limitation Jumper on the drive, the BIOS will auto-detect it as a 32GB drive. This is where the Maxtor software on the bootable floppy is supposed to jump in. Unfortunately, it gets so far loading up, then dumps me back to the command prompt with a `Command not recognized` followed by `Batch files nested too deeply` error."

Yup, I tried that. That`s where the Maxblast software falls over. I guess I could try just booting with a system disk and formatting the hard drive as 32Gb, but then I`ve lost out on 8Gb of storage space that I`ve already paid for, and I`d surely have to reformat the drive when I eventually upgrade my motherboard.

Guess I could manage on 32Gb though, after all I`m hardly likely to even half fill that - I just hate the fact that I could have saved myself a few quid (and a hell of a lot of grief) by buying a 30Gb drive. So much for trying to plan for the future...

This item was edited on Tuesday, 17th June 2003, 11:07

Update: I finally got it working!!! I got my BIOS patched by the nice bods at the Wim`s BIOS forums, and an older version of the Maxblast software from Maxtor. Drive auto-detected, formatted and copied fine, now I have a lovely 40gb of space! Hopefully Windows will behave itself a bit more now, and I can download more rubbish! Thanks to all who posted, your advice helped me through a difficult time...