What IDE cable are you using? Is it a standard 40 conductor or a newer 80 conductor? The newer ones are also finer gauge wire, are less flexible and sometimes have one of the wires punched out near one of the connectors.

Some boards don't like them.

Some boards require them.

I doubt a 440BX board would want one of the newer cables.

Hi Shores,

If your BIOS is from Award and has an August 1999 or earlier date, then you may be plagued by the infamous 32GB HDD limit bug.
If your 80GB drive has 32GB ‘capacity cap’ jumper, set this jumper and check if the drive works now. If so, you need a BIOS update. 😉

To help you with a BIOS update, please tell us the full BIOS-ID string as displayed on the first BIOS boot screen. Or attach a dump of your present BIOS to your reply.

Jan

Thank you both for your help!

1) Tried older cables to no avail, nothing changed.

2) Tried setting the 32Gb capacity cap jumper and the Maxtor 8oGb gets recognized, but the Hitachi 120Gb does not. ?? I'm puzzled, I thought that if the 32Gb bios limit was the culprit that solution should work for both drivers...

So, how can I dump the bios to make it available to you, Jan?

Thanks again to you both!

Dumping the BIOS from the flashchip can simply be done with a flash tool like Awdflash.exe.
If you don’t have the flasher for this board, you can use Awdflash v7.95.
You can download Awdflash v7.95 from my website at:
http://www.steunebrink.info/AWD795.zip

At a clean boot DOS prompt (no EMM386 or Windows), enter the command:

AWDFLASH /pn /sy

The /pn switch stands for “Program No” and /sy means “Save Yes”.
Leaving out a filename avoids the risk of flashing an incorrect BIOS.
After this command you should see something like this:

The Awdflash program shows you present BIOS partnumber and date, and the flashchip partnumber.
In the second “File Name to Save” box you can enter a filename of your choice. I used “BACKUP1.BIN” as example.
After pressing the Enter key, the flashchip contents will be saved in the file you specified.
Please post this BIOS file here, so I can help you decide which BIOS update is the right one for your board. 😀

Jan

Here the BIOS dump, even if the awdflash utility seemed to remain stuck on "please wait" message after saving the dump.

The awdflash utility reported this:

For i440BX-ITE867-2A69KS2IC-0 DATE: 04/07/1999
Flash type - MXIC 28F2000TPC /12V

Thanks again for your help!

Thanks for the BIOS dump. Checking this SY-6BA+.BIN file shows a valid Ver. 2CA2 BIOS with BIOS-ID:
04/07/1999-i440BX-ITE867-2A69KS2IC-00
This BIOS clearly has the 32GB HDD limit bug, so that’s why both your 80GB and 123GB drives didn’t work!

Note that this BIOS is for a Soyo SY-6BA+ board, while you wrote earlier you had a SY-6AB+ but I assume this was a typo and you actually have a 6BA+. 😉

The RetroWeb has several newer BIOSes for this board at
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/soyo-s … 6ba-2#downloads
Download the latest Ver. 2DA2 BIOS with ID: 07/11/2000-i440BX-ITE867-2A69KS2IC-00
This BIOS has full support for drives up to 128GiB!

Unzip the downloaded BIOS and again boot to a clean DOS-prompt.
Flashing the new BIOS can be done with the command:

AWDFLASH 6BAP2DA2.BIN /py /sn /cc

The /cc switch will clear the CMOS content so that data from the old BIOS will not interfere with the functions of the new BIOS version.
After flashing and reboot, you will see a ‘CMOS checksum error, defaults loaded’ message and from there you can proceed normally with your preferred BIOS Setup settings.

Now you are ready to use these big drives. 😀

Jan

Thank you very much, it worked like a charm and now they get recognized perfectly!

Great, thanks for reporting back!

Cheers, Jan