80 GB: 05/15/97-i440FX-977-2A69HF2GC-00 Freetech P6F77

BIOS update, EIDE card, or overlay software? (FAQ Hard disk recognition)
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TomasHanson
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Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2003 1:26 pm
Location: Germany

Hello out there,

I wanted to reuse an older motherboard as fileserver
for a comrade.
The board was a Freetech P6F77 with the i440FX Natoma
chipset. Sadly the latest available BIOS was too old
to support bigger hdds over 32 or 64 GB.

NickS already patched the latest available BIOS for this
board to support hdds up to 128 GB.

I flashed and tested it. And the patch works perfectly:
Let's see:

The WD800JB is recognized and detected by the bios.
The BIOS runs it at PIO Mode 4 (but there exists a
driver software that can run it at DMA-Speeds up
to 16,6MB/s).

I could install Windows 98, 2k Pro and XP Pro without
any problems.
I also made a partition located above the 64GB-barrier
to test functionality. There were no problems in writing
and reading data from this partition under the several
operatings systems. But I read in magazines that Windows
operating systems only have problems with hdds
containing more than 128 GB. I think there is
only support under Windows 2k and XP after a patch.

This patch works 100%.

Many thanks to NickS for applying the patch.

Great Work! ;-)


Greetings

Tomas Hanson
NickS
BIOS Bodhisattva
Posts: 3145
Joined: Fri May 03, 2002 10:34 am
Location: Thames Valley, UK

Thanks for the feedback, Tomas! Earlier versions of FDISK under Windows 98 can have trouble with HDD >64GB but you can download a newer version from Microsoft.
Tested patched BIOSes. Untested patched BIOSes.
Emails *will* be ignored unless the subject line starts "Wim's BIOS forum"
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