120GB: 02/06/2002-I845-ITE8712-6A69VE19C

nigel · Fri Jun 11, 2004 3:10 pm

Hi

My Boot drive is 60G and my old BIOS saw that OK and Fdisk partitioned it
OKsome time ago.

For extra storage. I bought a Seagate 120G drive and my then present BIOS would not see more than 32,248M of the new drive. I then used Seagate's DDO which worked OK for a few days and it did enable me to format and use the whole drive. However, after a while, new, large, garbled, phantom folders began appearing. They could not be deleted. It was not possible to use either scandisk or defrag on the drive because of the DDO.

I decided to remove the DDO with Seagate tools and go for a BIOS flash
upgrade. I went to www.esupport.com and a link on their website tested my old BIOS and said that an upgrade was available which would support up to 512G drives. It was specifically designed for my motherboard. It cost about £14.

The flash was sent in an email with full instructions and was very easy.
Unfortunately, the new BIOS still only showed the same disk drive space as the old one. Even using Fdisk (the one in ME which supports larger drives), it could only see and partition 32,248M of the new drive (100% used as primary dos partition).

E-support have tried to help, via many emails, with this problem. They argue that I must be doing something wrong because the new BIOS sees the full 60G of my Boot drive (as did my old BIOS) and therefore it cannot be faulty.

All cables are connected correctly. The new drive is set as secondary
master. The jumpers are all correct on all devices. There is no limit jumper on the new drive.

I have even disconnected all other drives/CD/DVD and tried the new drive as Primary Master but the BIOS still only sees 32,248M.

I have read every Microsoft article about large drives in ME but this cannot
be a Windows issue anyway, can it?

I have the newest chipset drives from my motherboard manufacturer. My IDE controller should support large drives.

Why can my old and new BIOS see the full extent of a 60G drive but only
32,248M of a 120G drive. E-support say this is impossible. They say it must see 60G in both and should see all of the 120G drive. I can only say that they have tried very hard to resolve this.

I don't want to return my new BIOS flash and get a refund because im just back where I started.

Any ideas please so that I can pass them to E-support.

Thanks a lot

Nigel

Motherboard Mercury (Kobian) KOB 845 NFSX)
Chipset Intel 1A30 rev 3
120 GIG Seagate drive (model ST3120022A)
Microsoft Windows ME Version: 4.90.3000
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1500 Mhz
Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
(Release 5.0) AwardBIOS Upgrade Provided by eSupport.com

Fri Jun 11, 2004 4:33 pm

What was your previos BIOS release? 1.0F?

1.1B is here: http://www.kobian.com/download_product. ... uct_id=109

You might want to try it out.

nigel · Fri Jun 11, 2004 4:43 pm

The only info i still have about previous version before the flash upgrade from esupport.com is:

Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG
02/06/2002-I845-ITE8712-6A69VE19C

This was the free flash upgrade from my m/b website but i think it only had minor fixes to my initial version.

Thanks

Fri Jun 11, 2004 5:50 pm

Heh... then it's originally an ECS board; specifically a P4IBMS v1.0x.

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWeb/Downloads/ ... IBMS(1.0B)

And the latest BIOS release is 1.1d, quite more recent than your previous release.

BIOS Information───────────────────────────────────
BIOS Version : Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG
BIOS Info : 09/04/2002-i845-ITE8712-6A69VE19C-00
BIOS Message : P4IBMS Ver 1.1d 09/04/2002
BIOS ID : 6A69VE19

nigel · Fri Jun 11, 2004 6:01 pm

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

Im not sure what u mean that its "originallyECS board; specifically a P4IBMS v1.0x"

The m/b is:
Motherboard Mercury (Kobian) KOB 845 NFSX)
Chipset Intel 1A30 rev 3

Do u think that the flash that u gave a link to would definitly work with this?

Nigel

Fri Jun 11, 2004 7:49 pm

AFAIK, Kobian isn't a mobo manufacturer; they simply resell rebadged motherboards. So, I'm quite sure they simply sell the ECS board as a Kobian.

Fri Jun 11, 2004 9:38 pm

Yes, they're selling ECS boards, often with modified BIOS. They have also a new nForce2 board which is Epox instead of ECS.

Sat Jun 12, 2004 1:35 am

Nigel: read the instruction leaflet or manual that came with the 120GB disk on how to remove the 32GB limit jumper on the drive.

nigel · Sat Jun 12, 2004 2:00 am

Hi

Theres no limit jumper. Only one jumper...to set it as Master.

Thanks for taking time to reply

Nigel