Hard disk drives?!?

[flinty]

Ok, just bought this 40GB Fireball lct 20. I have a really old machine, the motherboard is a Soyo 5EMA. When detecting the disk, the computer sits there. I timed more than half an hour before I gave up. Is this because of the ATA 100 bus. If so, what are my options?

[Berserker]

How old is your machine?
If your machine is still a 486, I doubt if anyone is still using it nowadays. Hehe..

Computer that still use the normal UDMA 33 may be able to detect the drive and use it at UDMA33 instead of UDMA 100. Flashing your computer BIOS with newer version might help your system to recognize the HDD though I suspect if you are still the Intel ZH, TX motherboard, then you are only limited to the first 8 GB of the drives. The BX and newer board don't have this limitations.

The only solution is to go to maxtor's site to download the format utility to get the full capacity of your drive.


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(o^_^o)

[This message has been edited by Berserker (edited 06-23-2001).]

[USSVoyager]

I believe the TX chipset can support more than 8GB. When I had my old Pentium MMX machine (TX chipset) then I had a 17GB Seagate disk and the BIOS detected the drive without problems.

I think the problem is more to do with the BIOS than the chipset, but I could be wrong. At the risk of repeating Berserker, you should try and get the latest version of the BIOS if you can.

Also, I guess you have checked already, but have you made sure that the drive jumpers are set up correctly?

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Speed is everything - Warp factor 9, Mr. Sulu!

[Shinma]

No.
It would not be due to ATA100.
Berserker and USSVoyager has already given you the possible fix with no extra costs.
Other alternatives would be to:
Locate a driver overlay utility from the HDD website and install it, if available.
Purchase an IDE card for your HDD.


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"I know nothing."
Cheers.

[Best4x4]

The Soyo 5EMA, EMA+, EMA+ ver1.0 and ver 1.1 all have a ETEQ/VIA southbridge UDMA/33 controller. The newer 5EMA+ Pro has an updated ETEQ/VIA UDMA/66 southbridge.

Head on over to Maxtor's website and see if they have any software like Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools, or Maxtor's own MaxBlast software which will enable you to use that HDD on older systems.

Also did you make 100% sure that you have the jumper settings correct? If the HDD is the only device on the primary IDE Channel you'll want to setup the drive as the Master.

Quantum ATA-100 to UDMA33/66 Software (http://www.maxtor.com/Quantum/support/csr/software/disk_binaries/lct20dma.exe)

Sincerely,

Best4x4

[flinty]

Thanks for the input guys. I got impatient, so I'm getting an interface card ordered in. Hard Drive knowledge isn't my forte, so I've made the assumption that a simple bios upgrade will not get around the incompatability problem.

The ATA interface card should fix my problems right?

[flinty]

And how will software help me? The drive never gets recognised in the bios. I sat it there for half an hour and it still sat without detecting a drive.