120GB Hitachi HDD not recognized by M715 v1.2 w/990401s.rom

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I have an Elpina BAE-VO 9825 (PC Chips M715, I assume) v1.2 board that was given to me, free, along with a 400 PII processor sticking out of it (only running at 266MHz because of the board's 66MHz bus). No wonder they were given to me for free.

Bios string is, I believe, 61-0401-000715-00101111-M715-1440L000-H.

Anyway, everything works fine as long as I put my spare 2GB hard drive in it. What I'd like to do is put a spare Hitachi 120GB in this machine, just because it's fun trying.

I've flashed the board with the latest bios that I can find on AJZ's PC Chips site (the 990401s.rom), but that bios won't see the Hitachi drive. Looking at the bios notes, it appears support was only extended up to 12GB. Well, that's no fun.

Am I stuck using a small hard drive with this board or is there a patch for this bios that will allow it to see a larger drive up to 64GB or 128GB?

Thanks for any help that can be provided.

[Denniss]

Enter HDD parameter manually in Bios and activate LBA. May work or not. Parameters (Cyl/Head/Sector) should be noted in HDD documentation or stamped onto it.

AFAIR I tested a M715 with a 40GB and it worked this way, I can't remember a test with 80GB or bigger HDD so you have to try.

Thanks, I didn't try that but should've. I'll try to take another shot at getting things to work later tonight.

[ajzchips]

Should work...

After a week, I was able to try things out again. This time the computer attempted to boot from the hard drive (I already have a fresh Win2K installation on it as well as quite a bit of backed up data, over 64GB worth) even though the hard drive isn't initially shown to be detected as the primary drive on the first IDE. What I've found out from the screen where the computer lists the devices and their IRQ's is that the 120GB hard drive is being seen as a 64GB (~65,000 MB) drive. So, shortly after attempting to boot to the drive but after it goes to the Win2K splash screen, it goes to a blue screen and gives some sort of boot error msg.

If you ask the bios to autodetect the drive, it will hang. Likewise, when the computer first boots up, it doesn't appear to detect the hard drive. It is only later, when the devices and IRQ's are listed in the box, that down at the bottom a hard drive of 64GB is shown as being detected. If I try to manually enter in the C/H/S, the hard drive is seen as an 8.4GB drive by the bios, so it looks like I'm stuck.

So, it looks like there might be a 64GB limit with this board using this bios, which would be fine if I weren't trying to install a 120GB drive that already had an operating system installed from a week earlier, when it was in a slower machine--an old Gateway PPro 200 I found in the street and was playing around with.

[ajzchips]

Being seen by the BIOS as 8.4GB isn't necessarily a problem. Several older BIOSes behave that way, cosmetically. Try it and see what FDISK says.

if your win2k was already reporting errors the HDD detection/settings were pretty successful in my eyes. Try to install a new windows in another Partition and/or make sure that the HDD is the same as it was in the PC which the windows was installed on (that boot.ini stuff with disknumbers etc. is still correct and you're using the same IDE channel (M715 board has IDE 1 and 2 not IDE 0 and 1 as usual and and only IDE 1 is labeled on the board)