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20GB: MS-5129 06/10/97-i430VX-2A59GM49C-00
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 7:43 pm
by Kill_Phil
I am trying to have my bios recognise a 20 gig WD hard drive, unsucessfully, as this bios only "sees" 8.4gb. I have updated to the latest bios from the MSI website. The purpose of said bios is apperantly to bring the bios up to y2k standards, and makes no mention of anything else on the website, so it didn't help do much anything except allow me to boot from cdrom. (why it wont let you check in this order (A, cdrom, C) is beyond me).
anyway, here is some of the information that I have gathered about the bios and motherboard.
Program: eSupport.com BIOS Detect v1.2 July 21, 2003
BIOS Date: 06/10/97
BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG
BIOS ID: 06/10/97-i430VX-2A59GM49C-00
OEM Sign-On: WI7C 040197
Chipset: Intel Triton 430VX rev 2
Superio: Winbond 877F (use 87h) rev 0 found at port 3F0h
CPU Type: Pentium
CPU Speed: 233 Mhz
CPU Max: 233 Mhz
BIOS ROM In Socket: Yes
BIOS ROM Size: 128K
Memory Installed: 96 MB
Memory Maximum: 128 MB
I cant seem to find any program that shows the "bios eval", so if you need any more info, please advise!
also, I realize that western digital has a program that supposedly allows a drive overlay of some sort that allows windows to "see" the whole hard drive, but i believe that would require a format of the drive (also, i have trouble finding documentation on this procedure, and I would like to use partition magic instead to simply resize the current partion without any data loss. also, if they bios can see the larger drive, it would just make things so much cleaner and easier in the future =)
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 9:48 pm
by Kill_Phil
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 12:19 am
by Denniss
AFAIK there's nothing newer supporting HDD up to 32GB but you may want to test the AMI Bios designed by MSI for their i430VX mainboards :
http://www.msi-computer.de/produkte/mai ... Seite=BIOS
http://www.msi-computer.de/download/bios/51xx/ai7a.exe
Use Uniflash to crosflash from Award to AMI and Clear CMOS, the Load Setup defaults/Settings at restart.
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 2:23 am
by Kill_Phil
so its not possible to enable larger drives with the old vx chipset then?
thats too bad, but its okay, i managed to get windows to recognise the 20 gigs using wd's utilitys. and all seems okay for now
just cant figure out why its showing up as generic ide disk type 46 in device manager, and also shows me having 2 floppy disks, when 1 is installed, sigh!
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:43 am
by ajzchips
Regarding the 2 floppies, you might have "Floppy B" enabled in BIOS.
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 4:16 am
by Denniss
Generic IDE Type 46 - just normal display if using M$ standard IDE drivers
The second floppy may be a side effect of using drive overlay software or a misconfiguration in Bios.
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:25 pm
by KachiWachi
Denniss -
The "patcher" won't work on his BIOS or...??
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:43 pm
by ajzchips
I'd go try the AMI BIOS too... Or a cheap PCI IDE card with its own BIOS.
@Kachi, the patcher(s) will only work if the BIOS has native HDD support over 8GB (upto 32GB).
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:23 pm
by KachiWachi
@AJZ - I knew that...I just didn't know if his BIOS had that or not (since it wasn't specifically mentioned). My BIOS core was 8/13/97...I guess his 6/10/97 core does not have the Int13 services available then...
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:18 pm
by ajzchips
I did check, and that was the underlying message in my previous post... If the BIOS were at least a couple of months more recent, then perhaps.
Sending an email to MSI might be a good idea. I've had good experiences in the past where they ended up sending me unofficial releases of BIOSes for older boards...
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:38 pm
by Kill_Phil
thats a good idea, i might do that. and as far as the 2 floppy drives goes, nobody seems to know why that i've asked. im not new at this, so all the basics are covered, bios settings, drivers, etc. I've installed windows twice with the drive overlay and earlier without the overlay, exact same problem. i can post up my question on another board for you guys to read, maybe your smart enough to figure it out, lol.
hardware
microstar ms-5129 mobo (with latest bios)
p1-233mmx
ati rage II+ pci
sound blaster 16 pnp isa
20gig wd hdd (with drive overlay to get around 8.4 gb barrier)
some floppy drive (i can find this out if nessecary, or even change it)
some cd-rom, old but works
98mb edo ram
software
windows 98 se + all windows updates
updated to latest sound \ video drivers
the problem
windows device manager shows under the "disk drives" section, that there are 2 floppy drives. specifically "GENERIC NEC FLOPPY DISK" is listed twice.
when I open My Computer, it shows an "A" drive, and it shows a "B" drive, both are 3.5 floppy drives. Only the "B" drive actually works, and it works fine, it accesses the disk and I have full functionality. But, the "A" drive, once clicked on, crashes the computer, and otherwise, dosent exist!
attempts to fix
I have tried removing the floppy drives from the device manager. Both, one at a time, and both at the same time, upon rebooting, it always finds two again and adds them again.
I also went into the registry and removed both floppy drives from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\Flop\ and still no luck, both always come back.
I went into the bios, and tried disabling the floppy controller there, this was interesting because when i booted back into windows, it showed me as having no floppy drives or controller in the device manager, BUT they still showed up in My Computer (very weird, is this a windows problem then?)
I also tried switching between pnp os installed being enabled and disabled in bios to see if there would be any affect, none (cept my sound dissappeared, but thats something entirely different).
I admit I havn't ran a virus scan yet, but I will after this post, and I will also post a dxdiag report after i fix my sound.
If anybody has something, ANYTHING, they can think of for me to try, that would be greatly appriceated, im STUMPED!
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:49 pm
by ajzchips
Check the "Swap floppy drives" feature in BIOS.
Is your floppy drive connected to the connector for the B drive?
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 10:26 pm
by Kill_Phil
i have the floppy connected to to the ribbon after the twist, as far as i know, thats the A drive as i've been connecting floppys that way for years and they always work.
the swap floppy drive in bios is disabled, should it try to enable it?
Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 8:29 am
by Ritchie
Your sure the floppy b is not enabled in Standard CMOS Setup. This is where I would first be looking, in case it accidentally got set or something corrupted some settings. I would also consider loading BIOS defaults.
For example, I recently recovered a BIOS via bootblock after which 147MB RAM was being reported instead of 128MB. Simply loading BIOS defaults corrected this.
Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 10:25 pm
by Kill_Phil
well, i've been through every setting in bios, many times, even tried playing with a few that i thought might have some effect, if it were as simple as floppy b being enabled, i would have seen that, infact i tried enabling floppy b, and disabling floppy a to see what would happen. I will try restoring defaults, and start over, but will this have any effect on my drive overlay as far as it working properly, because i installed the drive overlay before, and then re-detected the drive using the bios, and THEN formatted it, it came out to be 8 gigs, so i'd like to advoid that from happening again to avoid a couple extra hours of work!
and the msi support dosent have any bios for this mobo.