|
Answer» Greetings,
AS some of you MAY know, ive put together or have been putting together an older Retro machine. its together and parts are listed below.
Abit Bx6 Motherboard (i think first Rev)
512mb (2x 256MB) high profile ECC RAM
500Mhz Celeron Slocket CPU
Nvidia Geforce 2mx400, GPU 64MB AGP
DVD-RW IDE drive
I didnt mention a hard drive because im rather having issues with the drive. First i tried a 40GB WD which had both 98SE and 2000 SP4 dual boot that i had running on my Asus P2-99. With this Hard drive, the BIOS wouldnt pass Post. Just froze there.
I tried a nice Fujitsu 3.2Gb which booted windows 98SE but i wanted a fresh install. I loaded up FDISK and deleted the partition and even when selecting max size and FAT32 the drive now shows as 2014mb instead of what it is a 3200mb Drive. I booted from XP and 2000 CD just to see the same thing. The jumper is set to master.
Is this Drive dying or whats going on? Thats the max size FAT 32 recognises...ok, but i never select FAT32. I select maximum disk size and it shows 2gb. I also tried the XP disk that has NTFS and yet im only getting 2gb as well..FAT32 is max 4gb. im under. What are your jumpers set to on the drive? If your using CS jumper on a cable intended for MA/SL you can run into BIOS Post Drive issues. Make sure if your using a Cable Select type cable that both drives are set to CS for Cable Select. Otherwise if its a standard IDE cable set one drive to master and other to slave.i selected Master on the drive. But clearly it seemed like the hard drive was having issues. Now ive tried a DIFFERENT issue. I tired a working 6.4Gb Fujitsu drive. Ive tested it in OSX Disk utility and windows and it passed. Yet ive got it set to master and the machine will post but sit after the option to enter setup and mem test is over. i unplugged the ODD and HDD and it passed. then plugged it back in and it worked then the HDD and it didnt. I know the HDD is sent correctly to master, using IDE 1 and i tried another IDE cable. What am i missing? The BIOS of an older computer will not work right with a large drive. And even with a small drive it may not work until it has been formatted on the target machine. You should try an old drive with about 800 MB. That is Megabyte, not Gigabyte.
Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives
Notice that in the mid 1990S a single platter seldom had 100 Megabytes. Gigabyte drives were used only on large commercial systems. The PC did not handle large drives well due to older BIOS design.
From Microsoft archives:
A typical upgrade from Windows 95 requires approximately 195 MB of free hard disk space, but the hard disk space may range from between 120 MB and 295 MB, depending on your computer configuration and the OPTIONS that you choose to install.
Requirements to upgrade to windows 98.
The Motherboard BIOS will hang if the HDD is larger than around 32GB. This was the typical maximum H.D.D size without overlay software at around that time. A BIOS update may allow ACCESSING larger drives.
Quote I tried a nice Fujitsu 3.2Gb
MPB3032? I do not know what could cause it to misreport it's total capacity however I did have a 4GB Model of the same line start reporting as 2GB.http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/147495-30-abit-hard-drive-size-limitation
This suggests 75GB... Link dead since abit has been gone for many years.
Quote> *******************************
> Dear Valued Customer,
> largest HD the BX6 will support is 75GB.
> http://fae.abit.com.tw/eng/faq/generic/check75gb.htm
> Thank you for choosing ABIT.
>
> Regards
> Abit Technical
> *****************************
Quote from: DaveLembke on April 04, 2016, 08:30:11 AMhttp://www.tomshardware.com/forum/147495-30-abit-hard-drive-size-limitation
This suggests 75GB... Link dead since abit has been gone for many years.
Well for some reason it would NOT post past any of the 40GB drives i tried. The drive at the top appears to have a jumper issue. When set to master the drive is seen as 2gb and when in slave it shows as 3gb.
Now its being even more weird. I plugged in another Hard drive. This one i tested and according to both OSX and windows it passes. Its a Fujitsu 6.4Gb drive and the machine will pass Post but when detecting IDE drives it will detect both my ODD and HDD and then stop there.
When i unplugged the hard drive, it still hung, i unplugged both the ODD and the HDD and it passed post but obviously complained for a boot disk. Perhaps i need to reseat or switch RAM sticks? Maybe then it will recognize a 40GB WD IDE. I feel more comfortable trusting a 40GB drive from a p4 then all these old timers. The last 2Gb seagate drive i used, I put it aside for a semester when i was rebuilding towers, and it will no longer spin up.
|
