Why is this so? (160 GB = 8 GB)

BiosMan · Tue Dec 27, 2005 3:38 pm

Something strange just happened here...and I don't understand why.

I have an ASUS P3V 4X with the latest 1005 BIOS (not going to run the 1006 Beta). It currently has a 40 GB HDD installed, and is recognized correctly in the BIOS. The current BIOS can handle up to 137 GB.

I just installed (for external diagnosis) a 160 GB HDD. The BIOS recognizes it as 8 GB!

I thought it would at least have recognized it as 137 GB...can anyone explain why it read 8 GB in the BIOS?

Note that the W2K OS did recognize the entire drive capacity.

Thanks!

BiosMan · Thu Dec 29, 2005 2:23 pm

Something else strange just happened...

When I move a "small" HDD over to the 48-bit machine, it says it can't find ntldr.

Is there something strange about the 48-bit that will only allow systems formatted/MBR'd with it to function correctly?

Thu Dec 29, 2005 7:36 pm

Looks liek a BUG in Bios or this Bios translates the HDD geometry different than the other system these HDD were partitioned with. I had a similar problem with a Seagate 80GB partitioned with K7S5A AMI Bios. Connecting to older Award 4.51PG based boards capable of handling this capacity results either in wrong size or no detection at all.

BiosMan · Fri Dec 30, 2005 3:54 pm

Thanks Denniss.

I've been reading a bit more about it here...interesting reading.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=8 ... 91&t=46752

Sat Dec 31, 2005 2:05 am

Interesting indeed, maybe someone is able to patch the ESDI506.pdr in the future, M$ won't for sure.

Ritchie · Sat Dec 31, 2005 3:54 am

All I can say is that I have been reading a few issues in forums where drives larger than 128GB are detecting as 8GB, even where the BIOS is capable up to 128GB.

It appears to me that this may be an unfortunate symptom of drive detection behaviour.

BiosMan · Sat Dec 31, 2005 3:53 pm

Well the unfortunate upshot to this saga is that the drive in question was from a neighbors PC. It is full of viruses and mal-ware, so I thought the best way to clean it was to slave it off another HDD and scan it remotely...since all other attempts to do so were not working.

I didn't realize it was a large drive.

I also thought nothing of it when the host PC came up running chkdisk, and found "a lot" of errors.

Now the HDD won't boot in its original machine, but is perfectly readable in the slave machine.

So their best hope (and what I wanted to do anyway) seems to be to just save their data off to CD, then restore the disk back to the factory default (Sony VAIO PCV-RS620G).

BiosMan · Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:23 pm

Progress to date -

I used MBRSCAN to look at the drive information.

For the small drive (1 GB), the SONY machine was translating the drive differently than the ASUS machine (not sure who is correct at the moment, though the SONY seems to be)...so that's why it won't boot. The drive has a different setup in the partition table than what should be "standard" for this drive (CHS = 3355, 15, 63 vs. 3146, 16, 63 <- this is what is marked on the drive). Don't ask me why this happened...I'd have to try and figure out which machine I originally set the drive up in.

The big drive (160 GB) sets up OK CHS-wise, but the available sector count (Blocks in non-LBA mode) is wrong at 16,514,064 vs. 312,581,808. Partition 1 (Compaq Diagnostics) is correct as is the main boot partition (C:\). The problem shows as an Error #4 - Free space calculation...Partition areas are overlapped.

So what is most likely happening is the thing is wrapping around once it gets to the 137 GB limit.