I'm not familiar with the BIOS on that board, but perhaps the 32gb limit?

That is something I didn't think about. I noticed there were 32GB jumper settings. I shall give that a shot.

Definitely a BIOS limitation, but if it can't detect the 30GB HDD, it's not the 32GB limit so the jumper won't help 😉
See if you don't already have the latest BIOS http://www.philscomputerlab.com/aopen-ax59-pro.html
It's very common for boards of that era not to recognize these capacities.

According to http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/har … ze_barriers.htm , it is rare for a motherboard to have a 32 GB (or rather 31.5 GB) barrier. This would likely be the 8 GB barrier.

My experience with building computers really didn't start until about 2005 so this retro stuff is like a whole new territory.
How do I limit the capacity to 8GB on a hard drive?

If there's no jumper setting, then there's nothing you can do in that regard. I would agree that looking for a BIOS update would be a good idea.

You may want to consider getting a CF-to-IDE (or SD-to-IDE) adapter.

Easiest and simplest solution is to get a Promise Ultra100/133 PCI IDE adapter. It comes with its own BIOS and has no size limit.

Jonnyboy161 wrote:

I have three IDE hard drives that my motherboard (AX59Pro) will not detect. They are 40GB,30GB, and 60GB Hitachi Deskstar drives. I have been testing with just one HDD at a time on the IDE cable along with different master and slave jumper configurations. I have also tried 40 and 80 pin cables. I am not sure if it could be a setting the BIOS that I am missing(the IDE controllers are not disabled) or if I might need to flash the BIOS to ensure that it has the latest one. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Silly questions...
Are these HDDs good on other motherboards?
Is the board good with other HDDs?

Also, if you boot into Linux, BSD, Windows NT, or something else that doesn't depend on BIOS device enumeration, do the devices show up?

If not, you may have a horked ATA controller rather than a BIOS issue.

First I will try setting them 32GB jumper settings. If that doesn't work I will be testing them on another motherboard. If they are properly detected from that motherboard then I guess its the motherboard. I can test to see if the optical drive is recognized(I hadn't gotten that far yet). Then Maybe try to flash the BIOS.

Thanks for the help!

So it looks like the 30GB HDD was just dead. I set one of the other drives to a 32GB jumper setting and poof I am currently installing Windows 98.

Thanks again for all the awesome help.

Jonnyboy161 wrote:

So it looks like the 30GB HDD was just dead. I set one of the other drives to a 32GB jumper setting and poof I am currently installing Windows 98.

Thanks again for all the awesome help.

Don't throw it away yet, try it on a more modern system first. It's not necessarily dead (although certainly very possible).
Apart from the capacity limit some BIOS have weird values limits. As a silly example, it might not accept a value for cylinders > X. Imagine now having two HDDs of same capacity but with different geometry and only one getting recognized 🤣 This is rare of course and usually happens at the borders of supported capacities, but most probably you are at the borders, so give it another try just in case.

Jonnyboy161 wrote:

So it looks like the 30GB HDD was just dead. I set one of the other drives to a 32GB jumper setting and poof I am currently installing Windows 98.

Thanks again for all the awesome help.

Fantastic.

It might be worth the Hitachi drive tool to see if you can firmware limit the drive size like with Seagate drives.

Boards with the 32GB limitation are not rare ! Every board with an award bios that was created before somewhere in 1999 had this bug. And I've got many of these myself

It's not a bug, it's a known BIOS limitation. Patches for some boards do exist.

It's a BIOS limitation ... caused by a bug ^^

Apparently award bioses are fully capable of reading 128GB hdds out of the box, but in order to display the capacity at POST, it has to do a division which go wrong when the size is bigger than 32GB and locks up the computer (I've tried and for sure, if the hdd is bigger than 32GB the computer hangs)

Yea the BIOS would hang when detecting the IDE channel the drive was on. I will have to check on the 30GB drive some other time. I currently don't have another system built that isn't strictly SATA. I have the parts to build an AthlonXP build minus the case. But, I wouldn't have a use for that system if I built it other than to test that 30GB drive. I got Win98 installed now I am running into issues with trying to use a nVidia MX 440 AGP as my 2D card. I am going to pop in the Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM PCI card in there and give that a go.

Deksor wrote:

It's a BIOS limitation ... caused by a bug ^^

Apparently award bioses are fully capable of reading 128GB hdds out of the box, but in order to display the capacity at POST, it has to do a division which go wrong when the size is bigger than 32GB and locks up the computer (I've tried and for sure, if the hdd is bigger than 32GB the computer hangs)

I'm being pedantic here, but did they intend the BIOS to work with HDD >32gb? If it wasn't a requirement, it isn't a bug.

I don't know if that was intended, but looking at the behavior of this issue (just a single division that go wrong) and that when you modify it in order to fix that division it works perfectly and that the year where they fixed this problem, hdds this big were still a dream (when hdds bigger than 32GB were released ?), to me it's a bug.

I saw an old tutorial on how to fix this on bioses made for i430VX (i tried it on a bios for i440BX but unfortunately it didn't help) where they said that was a bug too. You have to fix two things. One will remove the 32gb limitation but then a 64GB limit appears but it can be fixed too. The next limit is the 128GB limit de to win9x limitations and LBA limitations. But your bios will not hang if you put let's say a 160GB hdd, it just won't be able to boot on it. But with oses such as win2k it will work perfectly fine