Which 80GB HD do you have with your ASUS P2B ?

[JohnTheLuck]

My Maxtor DiamondMax 40GB now gives me a SMART warning, so I am looking for a replacement. I want to upgrade to a 80GB. I bought today a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB 8Meg buffer, only to find that it is not recognized correctly by my BIOS. It sees only it as 32GB (my old 40GB is recognized as a 40GB though...).

Instead of trying all brands by myself, can you tell me which 80GB disk you are running on your P2B, and the BIOS version. Please be specific by including the mfg model number. Here is my system spec :

ASUS P2B rev 1.2,
BIOS 1014beta3,
Maxtor DiamondMax 54098H8

Thanks,

JTL

 

[JohnTheLuck]

Don't tell me I am the only one stuck which such a system !!! Help please. I just need the make and model number of you large capacity HD on your ASUS P2B system.

Please don't reply by suggesting jumper or autoconfiguration, latest BIOS, I did that already.

JTL

 

[oldfart]

It doesn't matter what brand of HD you have. If 80 Gig HD hits a BIOS limit, it doesn't matter which one it is. If a BIOS update cant fix it, just get a PCI ATA100 IDE controller card. It will solve the problem, and get you some extra speed as well.

And welcome to Anandtech!

 

[JohnTheLuck]

Originally posted by: oldfart
It doesn't matter what brand of HD you have. If 80 Gig HD hits a BIOS limit, it doesn't matter which one it is. If a BIOS update cant fix it, just get a PCI ATA100 IDE controller card. It will solve the problem, and get you some extra speed as well.

And welcome to Anandtech!

You probably read my post very fast. I mentionned that my 40GB, already above the 32GB knows BIOS limitation is working fine in my P2B system. Already running the latest BIOS.

I don't want to invest any more on this old system, I just want to replace a faulty HD.

Thanks anyway for the reply.

JTL

 

[InlineFive]

What OS are you using? You should make sure your new hard drive is formatted using NTFS so it can use the whole drive, FAT32 will limit you to what you are at right now with 32GB.

EDIT: Why don't you also try a non-beta BIOS?

 

[AndyHui]

Why don't you also try a non-beta BIOS

Because that is the latest BIOS for the P2B, and you MUST use it in order for a lot of the more modern hardware to work.

The P2B has had support for 64GB+ hard drives since about BIOS 1009. According the ASUS, the maximum should be 128GB. Is there a jumper setting to clip the maximum drive size to 32GB? If so, remove it.

 

[oldfart]

Heh, I was just going to suggest looking at the 32 Gig limit jumper and if that didn't work, to ask AndyHui
since he is THE GURU!

 

[JohnTheLuck]

Originally posted by: AndyHuiBecause that is the latest BIOS for the P2B, and you MUST use it in order for a lot of the more modern hardware to work.

The P2B has had support for 64GB+ hard drives since about BIOS 1009. According the ASUS, the maximum should be 128GB. Is there a jumper setting to clip the maximum drive size to 32GB? If so, remove it.

I already removed all jumpers from the drive. It was not recognized by the BIOS with the master jumper on!!!... There is effectively some jumper settings to limit the drive to 32GB, but of course, I want the full 80GB that I just bought!!!

During testing, I swapped between the two drives 40GB Maxtor and 80GB Western Digital. Maxtor everything ok, but the WD is limited to 32GB.

I saw on the web that you can install an ovelay to gain access to the whole capacity. I wonders how this work. I am not sure that could solve my problems because I have a pretty complicated setup which I want to move to the new drive using Norton Ghost. I have 3 primaries (only one active at a time) and 5 logical in the extended. This allows me to run 3 different OS, in a completely independant was.

Is the overlay install itself in the MBR, or in the boot record of every primaries ? Will this prevent me to tranfert my data with Ghost ?

Thanks,

JTL

 

[AndyHui]

Overlay software is fairly unreliable in my opinion; I would strongly recommend purchasing a PCI IDE Controller....ATA100 or ATA133 and using that instead. Apart from solving the capacity issues, you would also see an increase in performance as you would be getting full transfer rates instead of being bottlenecked at ATA33.

I'm still a bit surprised that your 80GB drive isn't fully recognised. If you are using FDISK, that is understandable, since unpatched Win98 FDISK has issues with drives over 64GB.

 

[Sunner]

I have an P2B-DS running fine with a 80 GB 120GXP(IBM/Hitachi).
Using the same BIOS as you.

Didn't have any problems, before I put this disk in, I was using 1007 or something like that, needless to say, it didn't work, flashed with 1014, worked like a charm without any further messing around.