VOGONS


First post, by Smack2k

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Have an ASUS P2B Board - BIOS version 1012 running. Using Seagate's Seatools, I set the drive size to 128 GB, or the max size Windows 98 can see (actually around 137). Rebooting into Seatools and the drive is listed as 137 GB. But when I boot the machine normally, during POST, its listed as only an 8 GB (LBA, UDMA2) Drive. I have the drives set to Auto in the Standard CMOS Setup so I am not sure what is going on. The HDD is in good shape as I ran it through Crystal Disk to check it and it came up good and clean.

Am I doing something wrong here that the BIOS is only seeing 8 GB Drive but Seatools sees it properly at 137 GB?

I reset CMOS as well so BIOS is set to defaults. The only changes I made were disabling the serial and parallel ports and changing the boot order

Reply 3 of 5, by Malvineous

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I googled for "BIOS 8GB limit" and according to the first result the int13 BIOS interface is limited to 8.4GB:

Hard drives over 8.4 GB are supposed to report their geometry as 16383/16/63. This in effect means that the `geometry' is obsolete, and the total disk size can no longer be computed from the geometry, but is found in the LBA capacity field returned by the IDENTIFY command.

When you set the drive to Auto in the BIOS, did you also set it to LBA? IIRC early Award BIOSes let you change between LBA and CHS ("Large") even when the drive was set to auto.

By the looks of it, the BIOS will only see the first 8GB so as long as you install your OS in this part of the drive then it will be fine. The rest of the disk will become accessible once the OS loads, if it's an OS like Windows that supports LBA.

I remember installing Linux back in the 90s and you had to make sure the boot partition was within the first 8GB of the drive so that the BIOS could boot it. Once the kernel was running it could see the whole disk. If you did it wrong you could create a single partition larger than 8GB which would appear to boot properly, but as the drive filled up over time, system updates would eventually place the updated OS files beyond the 8GB mark and then the BIOS couldn't load them anymore, so when you rebooted the system wouldn't come back up. Fun times.

Reply 4 of 5, by Smack2k

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I will give that a shot...I had Windows installed, and it only saw an 8 GB C Drive, but in my frustration, I shut it down and tried to FDISK it again before looking into Disk Manager to see if the rest of the space was there....

The Drive is set to Auto and Auto in the BIOS, but on POST, its reporting as LBA, UDMA 2 if I set the UDMA Mode to Auto. If that isnt set to Auto and is disabled, it gives a different drive type but same size. I will boot it up and take a look at the settings...thanks for the advice...

I flashed the BIOS to 1014.003 as well to no avail.

Reply 5 of 5, by Smack2k

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I set the Drive in BIOS to Auto and LBA and no change, still sees it at 8 GB Drive...

Guess I will have to reinstall Windows and hope the other 130 odd GB are there and I can set it up as D Drive...

EDIT - After doing some digging on the web, found a few places people mentioning the ASUS P2B BIOS, even at BIOS Version 1014 will only see up to 120 GB Drive.

Went into Seatools and set the drive to 120GB and the BIOS sees it properly now as 120GB.....