HDD issues

[dswesse]

I've been attempting to replace an old system's hdd with a new western digitial drive. When the drive is in the system, it will not recognize it in bios, no matter if its primary, secondary, or whether or not the jumpers are set to primary, secondary or cable select. The sytem is an old K6 box used for light browsing and office work. However, if I take the drive and put it it a K7 system, it is still not recognized by windows, but it is seen in the bios and recognized. I've installed tons of drives and not had this happen before. I need to know if this is an issue of a bad drive or if theres something else I'm missing.

Thanks for the help

 

[jackschmittusa]

Windows won't see it till it's partitioned and formatted. Is the bios in the old machine set to "auto detect" what's on the ide channels?

 

[dswesse]

Yup, it is set to auto detect in bios, and even when I refresh the view to auto detect, it still does not see the drive. I had forgotten that I have yet to partition it so that explains the windows thing. However, I'm still confused as to why I cannot get the bios in the K6 system to recognize the drive when the K7 has no problems with it.

 

[rasczak]

what os are you running? and how big is the drive? generally older oses don't recognize drives taht are bigger tahn 128gb, by older i mean win 95 win 98. win 2k i'm not sure about. winxp does recognize it up to 200gb i think. then you need to install sp2.

my numbers may be off by a bit but that is the gist of it.

 

[Bozo]

It's posible the older BIOS will not recognize the drive if it is too big. Maybe a BIOS update?

Bozo

 

[WW2Planes1]

Originally posted by: jpbelauskas
what os are you running? and how big is the drive? generally older oses don't recognize drives taht are bigger tahn 128gb, by older i mean win 95 win 98. win 2k i'm not sure about. winxp does recognize it up to 200gb i think. then you need to install sp2.

my numbers may be off by a bit but that is the gist of it.

you're about right.
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/size.html
Storage Review as an excellent reference section. This part descibing the various harddrive size barriers.
most likely, Your BIOS is limited in the number of cyliniders it can handle (See here). Thus, your hard drive is limited to 32GB.

The problems w/ Windows 95/98/2000/XP stem from the Logical Block Addressing scheme. LBA replaced older modes of addressing data on the hard drives in order to allow for larger size hard drives. However, the older method used 28bits to address, reasulting in a 128GiB/137GB limit. See here. Note that when this guide was written, they had not solved this problem. so the information here is slightly out of date.

It was decided (at some point, I'm not sure when), that a new 48-bit LBA scheme would be used. (this, for the record, limits hard drives to somewhere in the range of 144 Petabytes). http://www.48bitlba.com/ should have some good information on this, although it too is out of date. They state that the next limit (not related to LBA) will occur at 2.2Terabytes. I think this is due to the NTFS file system, but I'm not positive (it is related to a 32-bit addressing scheme in some way).

Probably way more information than you needed, but I hope it helps.

 

[newhemidude]

On older machines like that you sometimes have to download a program from the drive's manufacturer to make the BIOS see it. I would check that out. Of course, depending on the size of the drive and OS being used, it may not see the entire drive.