Hello! I'm doing my first retro build and I've ran into an issue. The BIOS and boot sequence hang when auto detecting the hard drive.
Here's a photo to help: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/pudBOr9
The board is a ga-6bxc. The hard drive is a white label 80 GB IDE.
Any ideas on where to start debugging?
I think this may be because the hard drive capacity it too large for the motherboard to handle. I would first try to update the motherboard's bios and if that doesn't work then trying to limit the hard drive capacity to something like 32 GB or swapping it out with one with a smaller capacity.
wrote:I think this may be because the hard drive capacity it too large for the motherboard to handle. I would first try to update the motherboard's bios and if that doesn't work then trying to limit the hard drive capacity to something like 32 GB or swapping it out with one with a smaller capacity.
Thank you. I don't have another machine with an IDE connector, so I'm going to look for a smaller drive.
On the BIOS front, there is a newer version available, but I'm not sure how to actually flash it. I'm used to newer motherboards that let you flash from USB or from within Windows itself. I'm guessing I'd need to be able to get it on a Floppy or CD, right?
Solved it... there was a jumper setting on the drive to limit it to 32 GB.
pentium 3-mmx
750E MHz
bios is too old, cant even handle the cpu 😀 didnt 750E usually mean its a 133MHz 1GHZ coppermine in a 100MHz fsb board?
Updating the bios to the last version should fix that HDD detection bug (because yes, it's a bug)
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wrote:Thank you. I don't have another machine with an IDE connector, so I'm going to look for a smaller drive.
On the BIOS front, there is a newer version available, but I'm not sure how to actually flash it. I'm used to newer motherboards that let you flash from USB or from within Windows itself. I'm guessing I'd need to be able to get it on a Floppy or CD, right?
That is correct, you will need a floppy to update the bios. There are two different versions on the website, version F3 and F4c(Beta). I would try version F3 first, so to flash it simply download the file and run it. It will ask where to unzip it to, so set it to unzip to a floppy drive with a blank writable floppy disk. Then just put the floppy disk in the drive on the proper machine and boot from it.
Also what rasz_pl said is probably true, the cpu speed probably should not be detected like that, but I'm not entirely certain. I would try to figure that out before flashing the new bios.
that's the same result when i try to use a IDE to SATA adapter on my ASUS P2B, it locks up after posting, not going further.
R5 5600X, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 TI, Win11
P3 600, 256 MB RAM, nVidia Riva TNT2 M64, SB Vibra 16S, Win98
PMMX 200, 128 MB RAM, S3 Virge DX, Yamaha YMF719, Win95
486DX2 66, 32 MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440, ESS ES688F, DOS
