HDD / EZ-BIOS size limit query

Hi all

I have a GA-586-T2 motherboard which says it has onboard Enhanced IDE interface

have used it sucessfully with a 10GB seagate HDD and it can see the whole drive size

when I try to fit a 40GB WD HDD the BIOS refuses to autodetect (locks up) unless I jumper the HDD to misreport its size low - which means I will have to use EZ-BIOS to access the whole capacity of the drive.

I don't want to use EZ-BIOS if at all possible!

I'm used to size limits at 528MB, 2.1GB and 8.4GB... is there then another size "watershed" somewhere between 10GB and 40GB? Presumably yes, although the manual doesn't mention it...

what's going on, please?

TIA and best wishes, HJ.

 

Hi Hugh

You are right, seems others have experienced what you are facing....seems that motherboard has a 34 gig barrier.....odd.....but here is a link ...

http://www.ryston.cz/petr/bios/ga586t2_mod.html

He get's into some gray area's but, at least you know your not the first...

cheers
Jake

 

Jake - cheers for the link - it is indeed v4.51 I can only do 2716's here (reveals age!) but can probably borrow something suitable - at least it's not soldered in...

best wishes, HJ.

 

Hi HJ,

If it was me and it was possible to jumper the disk to read the size as 32gb, I would live with that until I got a newer machine. Only miss out on 8gb in the meantime. If you kept it lean, mean and clean you probably would not miss the extra space anyway.

I think you are wise not to use EZ-BIOS.

Matt
mmmm.... get another 40 gb?...Jumper that to 32gb as well... totals 64gb and 80gb when you get a new machine (??)

 

Greetings

I wouldnt advise setting a hard disk drive for a capacity that it is not. You will find the drive will have problems long term.

Things like the sector count, head parking areas, diagnostic partition (section of hdd at end used by system for diagnostics, often invisible) and various other things relying on certain sector locations will fail. Defragging may corrupt the drive too.

Best thing to do is this (if you cant get appropriate BIOS upgrade).

Buy a ATA IDE controller card or RAID controller card. You then plug the new drive into this and the support for the drive is in the card, not the motherboard then. This option will also give you the full speed capability for the new drives (ie ATA133).

You can get overlay software, that you must install before windows, which can extend the support for larger hard disks. Check your hard disk maker for this. Downside of this is a) You wont be able to image the drive b) You wont be able to duel boot OSes, and c) you wont see any speed increase in the new disk, although it probably is much faster.

Cheers!

 

Hi all

thanks for all the input; to explain a bit:

this crate is not going to need a lot of storage, I have a roomy Pentium3 with 60GB at the moment and bays to spare - but there are other limitations / requirements: the main purpose of the GA-586T2 board is to provide slots and it's a multi-boot system

the slots are actually more precious than extra storage - 20GB would be adequate

at the moment:
DOS6.22 / Win3.11 / Win95b are all on 850MB FAT16 primary IDE master;
Win98SE on 40GB (or whatever!) FAT32 primary IDE slave first partition

final layout (probably) as above but with another small FAT16 drive which will have to be D:, Win98 will have to shunt up to E:

(I can only get the apps working OK if I have the FAT16 drives first)
(one floppy boot for DOS/WFW, another floppy boot for Win95b)
(it's easier to get Win95b right if I can unplug the Win98 drive when fiddling with Win95)

==

the main reason for changing the seagate 10GB to a WD 40GB was noise! - the seagate 10GB drive was awfully noisy, the 40GB Caviar is silent

==

at the moment I've decided to curse myself with EZ-BIOS again - while I get the files into some sort of order on the other machines; I've just had to pull the EZ-BIOS off a 30GB, 40GB and 60GB in succession - shunting the files around each one (between computers) in case it all went wrong - which it didn't, the data stayed intact - the nett result is ~70GB of mess to unscramble

hopefully this will only be a temporary situation - I intend to have a go at making a ROM (at least to get up to 65535MB)

If it were only a 2716 I'd have had it done in 10 minutes from the link of Jake's post - I (still) make quite a few EPROMs here

==

actually it was getting the EZ-BIOS off the 850MB which turned out to be the complete nightmare

where I went wrong was to follow WD's instructions for installing the HDD - I should have uninstalled the EZ-BIOS in the machine which had put it on first.

But I didn't - I just "Installed" the drive (which already had EZ-BIOS to cope with an old 486 528MB limit) into a computer which didn't require EZ-BIOS - using WDs own setup floppy. Well - it said that EZ-BIOS would be installed if necessary...

It didn't work. Although the tools said the drive had been set up OK it didn't work in the computer.

Realising what had gone wrong, I replaced the HDD into the original 486 to uninstall the EZ-BIOS there... total nightmare: I found I now had a WD hard drive which WD tools wouldn't recognise as one of their own manufacture. And WD tools won't play with non-WD drive...

...particularly galling as other utilities - and my BIOS - were recognising the drive fine: Cyl, Sec, Tk all measuring OK

finally I found a way out - Ontrack Disk Manager v9.53 (boot floppy) which I used to install Ontrack's Overlay, then pull it off again. The Ontrack software, it seems, isn't "picky" about who made the HDD... actually it was all quite painless

sorry for the detail - reckon it worth posting in case it helps someone avoid the same nightmare, and to indicate a solution...

best wishes, HJ

 

Hugh...

You still burning eproms....awesome....I haven't done much of that since my days in tech school....some day when my wife's health problems settle down, that is one of those tinker hobbies I'd like to get back to...hopefully you'll still be lurking around here in case I need to pick your brain ..

Cheers
Jake

 

EPROMS??...I wondered what the 2716 was in reference to. I'm just interested in picking up the pieces after EZ-BIOS has done it's business. Maybe you and Jake should start your own EPROM forum .

Just wanted to say that, like you found, Ontrack seems a much better program. I run it on one of my drives and if I find a problem, I just rerun the program (if you change the IDE configuration it MAY give an error message). I could backup and remove it, but I am not having any problems. BTW...how did you... "then pulled it off again "? I have found little information about removing it ( of course )

Matt

 

EPROMS - sure I'm still burning EPROMS, mainly 'coz nobody's told me that it's not allowed anymore (yet!)... and because they're mindbogglingly useful. Not using them for code so much now (did lots of that back in the '80's) - can do lots of things with them...

...like on a nixie clock I'm putting together, to work the hours: EPROM gets addressed by binary count 00 > 23, and by one bit to select 12hr / 24hr mode; lower nybble of output byte is hours(units); lower 2 bits of top nybble select 0, 1, 2, for hours(tens), the fourth possibility these two bits afford I'm using blank the digit (dummy load that display's anode same as if it were showing a digit, else the anode voltage goes up and it tends to ghost); upper two bits of top nybble are for separate AM and PM indicators - separately so both can turn off at the same time for 24hr mode

So I get binary to packed decimal conversion, 24hr/12hr display modes, leading zero blanking, AM/PM indicators - AND 00 o'clock showing as 12 o'clock (for 12 hr mode) - all out of one chip. Wahey!

==

This got onto EPROMS because of the link in Jake's first post; I haven't had the guts to peel off the sticker from the BIOS chip (yet) but I know it's larger than the ones I can do here - it's got more legs. Also I don't know the technology (yet) but I suspect it isn't a FLASH chip (there's nothing about flashing in the manual) and anyway (AFAIK) most times one sort of ROM can often substitute for another as long as speed etc is OK. EPROMS are notoriously slow so would have to be a bit careful about this... is why they get shadowed to RAM...

Am getting cold feet though as 1) EZ-BIOS is now on the drive and 2) have discovered that BIOS v4.51 comes in many flavours, the 4.51 doesn't nail it properly...

==

What's probably actually going to happen is I'll find a 20GB and use the 40GB in a better machine

==

Jake - sorry to here about wife - been down same road myself too recently for comfort, eats whole chunks of time & unfortunately selective, only eats the best bits. Hope things get better soonest ...you know where to come if you need a 2716 blown

Matt - Ontrack Disk Manager's got me out of a Maxtor mess too... I think they ?supply the software to WD and Maxtor - perhaps other HDD mfrs too?

re: "pulled it off again ": both WD Tools and Ontrack have options to remove an EZ-BIOS overlay:

WD Tools boot floppy:
EZ-Install > Advanced Options > EZ-BIOS Setup - from which menu you have to do two things in order: 1) Disable EZ-BIOS; and then 2) Remove EZ-BIOS

Ontrack boot floppy:
Advanced Options > Maintenance Options > Dynamic Drive Overlay - gives you Upgrade & Remove options. Never tried the upgrade option, no idea what it does

?what's behind this is that the Overlay takes various forms depending upon the BIOS limitation - I messed up trying to remove a 528MB-type overlay in a machine which (guessing) behaves as if it has a 8.4GB BIOS limit (as far as the disk tools can tell) - at which point the WD tools gave up the struggle

best wishes, HJ

 

Wow, great stuff HJ. I have recently been introduced to the computerised machinery we have at work. Your info gives me some good insights.

I have the IBM "Disk Manager" version of the Ontrack program and have not found it yet. I will check.

"Remove EZ-BIOS "...I use that a lot .

Thanks for that and Best Wishes to you too.

Matt

 

it seems Ontrack sell / license (or whatever) their software to many organisations...

...the version I have calls itself "Disk Manager 2000 v4 "; it has 4 main options, the second button is called "Maintenance" which takes you to a screen giving several choices among which is "Create Disk Manager diskette" - the diskette I booted from to get the "Remove" and "Upgrade" functions as per post above (the diskette calls itself v9.53)

I tried Maxblast which has a similar diskette creation facility - but with Maxblast you need 2 floppies

**these floppies (Ontack, Maxblast, whichever) really need to be defect free - do this before you start - Scandisk w. Thorough will do

==

Ontrack vs. Maxblast diskettes:

setting up a drive from the Maxblast diskettes requires more RAM than using Ontrack

I tried on a computer with 8MB RAM (OK trivial amount by today's standards but... you can run Win95 with 8MB, and many apps are happy sitting on the 32-bit Win95 platform, using the virtual memory it provides)... Maxblast wouldn't play, Ontrack worked fine. (is why I got the Ontrack in the first place.)

seems a bit daft that a computer which can run Win95 OK can't cope with running what's on a couple of floppies... particularly when one purpose of said floppies is to cope with ancient motherboards

==

something I wanted to mention re: the WD Tools... there's an option to "Copy Entire Partition ", very useful for upgrading to a larger HDD; but this has a bug - it tends to leave the original partition with FAT errors. The "target" of the copy process comes out OK - but the "source" gets FAT errors. Bizarre.

So if for some reason the new drive doesn't work out and you want to fallback to the original - watch out! (Scandisk seems to fix this OK as far as I can tell)

==

I agree with the argument that it's worth staying with the toolkit from the same mfr. as made the HDD - but here now are two examples of when that advice didn't work out for me

best wishes, HJ.