Seagate baracuda 160 GB not detecting

[drugwash]

In the BIOS, edwin; it's all about the BIOS. I could deal with the software, but I need to have the BIOS sharp on the real drive size.
Besides, as you can see in my post above, I'm gonna stay with Win98SE as my OS of choice, although I may play with others, including Knoppix and K/Ubuntu.

Any idea on that? Thanks for replying, so far.

[edwin]

Not a cosmetic problem perhaps? Have you tried hdinfo from here?
http://www.48bitlba.com/

[drugwash]

Is there a clean solution not involving shareware tools?

[edwin]

I have no idea, if Jetway left out 48bit LBA support I don't think you can do much about it other than getting a customized bios at esupport or a controller card.

[cp]

please, don't shoot me ;) but if you're willing to use W9x i do agree with edwin : go buy a controller card.

otherwise, if you're going to use Knoppix or K/Ubuntu you wouldn't need to worry about it.

[drugwash]

Should I assume that nobody around here does BIOS patches anymore? If I could afford to buy all kind of software that I only need once and a customized BIOS, I would definitely buy myself a new mobo instead. Unfortunately, I have to rely on freeware/open-source and stick to the hardware I got.

[EDIT] Just noticed your reply, cp. Well, apparently you haven't noticed my first post in the thread: there are IDE drivers for Win9x that work with 48bit LBA HDDs. I posted a link there. So I could use Win98SE safely, if that BIOS wouldn't be limited to 137GB.

If I switch to manual and CHS in the BIOS, I can modify the settings for the drive and I can show greater sizes, but Seagate doesn't show the real values for CHS in their drive specs (or maybe that's not possible, I don't know), they only show 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors for all their drives over 100GB.
The BIOS says 65535 cylinders, 16 heads, 255 sectors for the 136GB capacity in AUTO mode.

[cp]

Yes, those are the maximum CHS values that ATA(PI) allows (http://www.phoenix.com/NR/rdonlyres/9BE ... sedd11.pdf). This was surely one reason for LBA48.
Seagate supplies these values for a reason: they are the combined limits of (most later) BIOS Int13h and ATA(PI) (that's 16514064 sectors) (read: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-11.html)

Win9x still relies on the information the BIOS provides..even with the patched driver it does (http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=46752 see the post from hp38quser and the screenshot). So nothing has changed so far. The only thing they did was to remove another barrier, that would cause data loss if someone tried to write data beyond the CHS limits (counters would overflow and *booooooooom*). Your BIOS still has to support LBA48. Any AWARD 6.00 _should_ support LBA48...apparently this BIOS doesn't. I don't know why..

A real fix for the LBA48 issue with W9x would supply a driver that would force W9x to accept the LBA48 values the HDDs hold rather than using anyhing that any BIOS supplies.

You could try the Southbridge Manufacturer's IDE driver..Intel and VIA (maybe SIS, ALi and NVidia, too) supply a driver that _should_ help W9x with that. I didn't test and i won't..but maybe that's the ultimate fix for your problem.

[edwin]

Should I assume that nobody around here does BIOS patches anymore?

We patch old 4.5 award bioses up to 137GB. The new award 6.0 bioses should have LBA48 support in the first place, if it is not there there's nothing we can do about that until someone finds out where that bug is hanging out. We have found the 32/64GB limit bugs, not the 48bit one (yet).

[drugwash]

OK, so I still didn't get a clear answer: is there anybody able and willing to patch that BIOS or not?
[EDIT] I didn't get to read the previous post, because for some reason, I couldn't access the site for some time right during and after posting. Devil's hand...
[/EDIT]
That HDD is brand new, I didn't even want to partition it until this issue was fixed. I got it as a birthday present and I wouldn't want to give it away or anything, because of this BIOS flaw.

As you said (and I thought of that too), the 6.00 version of the AWARD BIOS should support 48bit LBA. Maybe there's a bug somewhere. I tried changing values for heads and sectors and I could get to display a total size of 2TB for 65535, 255, 255 CHS. So at least the math there is correct.

Maybe there's a problem with the SiS630 chipset or it's only a badly designed BIOS. Thing is, with manually changed values (I tried to bring it around 159-160GB), it wouldn't be recognized at POST, I always got an error related to Primary Master device.

[edwin]

Try with an old 40pin ATA33 cable (so not a new 80wire one with colorcoded connectors).

[drugwash]

OK, did that. No visible change, except for throwing it back from ATA66 to ATA33 when set to AUTO.

Settings:
IDE Primary Master: MANUAL
Access Mode:
• AUTO: 65535, 16, 255 (136GB) not tweakable
• LARGE: 4095, 240, 255 (128GB) not tweakable
• LBA: 16643, 255, 63 (136GB) not tweakable
• CHS: 65535, 16, 255 (136GB) freely settable up to 65535, 255, 255

When changing heads from 16 to 18 (154GB) or 19 (162GB), on POST I get the message Primary master hard disk fail.
Any change in Cylinders, Heads or Sectors that exceeds 136GB will result in that error message and the drive not being detected at all.

[edwin]

Apart from an email to Jetway tech support I have no other options but the controller card or a commercial bios upgrade.

[drugwash]

OK, thanks. I'll take option A and if no positive result will come out, I'll take option D: ditch the mobo. I never liked SiS anyway.

[drt2928]

edwin, I have a similar, yet regressed case. I cannot seem to find a way to get my HDD over 32Gb, when I use fdisk then it goes to 80Gb but I cannot use it (it keeps saying that is needs to be formatted when I try to use it, even though it is). I have not had this problem with other drives.

I am running winXP Pro SP2.

I want the 160Gb to be secondary storage, if I need to break it up I will.

[Denniss]

What happens if you set cyl/heasd/sector to 16383, 16, 63 and activate LBA ?
-> that's an old work-around used on some older boards with HDD autodetect problems such as Pcchips M571 with AMI Bios hanging with HDD between 40 and 60 GB.
Maybe it works with your board or not.