20GB HDD in an old Pentium 200 machine, cant get it to work properly

[Acanthus]

I have a customer with an ancient Pentium 200 machine 40MB of SDRAM, Matrox god knows what graphics (ill worry about that later), 10/100 lan (recent upgrade), US robotics 56k modem. This bad boy is an HP. has a 100w AT power supply been forever since ive seen one this big haha.

Anyway the 2.1GB HDD in there crapped the bed 2 days ago, the smallest i could order new was a 20GB Maxtor 5400rpm ATA100, i know theres an adressing limit on old motherboards of around 8GB, and this mobo seems to have that limit as it detects the drive as an 8GB in the bios automatically.

I used a winme boot disk to get into dos, then fdisked the drive to a 20GB partition. Restarted to format, says i have no HDD when i get into dos again, i put the drive on another machine and deleted the 20gb partition and created 3 6.5GB partitions figuring it could adress the 6GB partitions, no go. Deleted 2 of the partitions and left one 6.5GB partition on the drive, still no go. Took off the partition, fdisk sensed the drive again.

Made a 4GB partition on the drive, installed Winme on my machine (P4 geforce 4 rig) let it copy all the files, when it restarted i pulled the drive and put it in the other machine, the machine wont detect the drive at all.

If there is any work around for the size addressing limit please lmk, even if it leaves the drive at 2GB effective, all they want is a working machine.

 

[tigerwannabe]

i think most maxtor drives come with special software that will get around this problem; kinda like ezdrive for quantum. you might wanna check out maxtor's website for info, too.

 

[NICKCARTER]

Of curse, if the addressing problem limit you to 8 gig you can run it like a 8gig drive.
But what fdisk do you use? My old win98 fdisk also have a "big drive" limit (I don´t rem the number),
I did not get it right until I use´t Partion Magic.
Also, look at your bios config.........

 

[Acanthus]

its an HP bios it has basically "work" and "dont work" options, there are no options for HDD at all, other than auto or manual, both set it to 8GB maximum size, on maxtors website it suggest using a PCI HDD controller and i happen to have an ATA133 PCI laying around from when i purchased a 40GB drive. I'm gonna try that hopefully the PCI card will be able to address it without many issues.

 

[NICKCARTER]

That will hopefully fix this problem (you never now !?)
Good luck!