A new HD in an old PC

[aquamarineafterglow]

Hello,

I am having a problem and hoping someone here can point me in the right direction. I do very light technical support in my hometown. A client has given me a challenge...to put a new HD in an old PC. I'm willing to give it a go, I just need to know what to do. I have completed the physical act of changing the hard drive out and reconnecting it. The old PC is an AST Advantage! Adventure 486DX-66mt and had an old HD with around 600MB space. She wants a 10GB drive put in it. After installing the new drive and booting the computer, this is what I get.

AST MT BIOS Rel. 1.00
Copyright AST Research, Inc. 1993
All Rights Reserved.

11.10 Your floppy drive is identified incorrectly in System Setup. Run System Setup to change the configuration.
Press <F1> to continue.

<I then press <F1> and get this....>

Load Error!
Press a key to reboot...

If I press any key to reboot, I get the same message over and over. I have to press ctrl-alt-del in order to reboot. Can someone point me in the right direction as I am eager to learn how to do this. Thanks in advance,

Aqua

 

[butchrecon]

Does the BIOS see the drive at all? You may have to manually input in the BIOS the SECTORS, HEADS and such. What is the PC BIOS?

 

[aquamarineafterglow]

I have no idea, I can't get any further into the computer but what I just showed you in the previous post. I press F1 to go into setup, but it won't go. It will only give me a load error. How do I get into Bios if I can't F1?

Thanks,
Aqua

 

[butchrecon]

Possibly (ESC) or (DELETE) or (F10) or (F12). Try delete first.

 

[Comtech]

Put her old drive back in the computer as master, and slave the new drive to it (don't worry about CD-ROM at this point).
Boot the computer using F1 to get into the setup.
Notice that it now works.
AST puts the &quot;BIOS&quot; otherwise known as the CMOS setup on a hidden partition of the HD, and just swapping in a new HD won't work. You'll need to find a setup diskette for that AST so you can partition and format the new drive correctly, including the hidden CMOS setup partition, before you can use the new drive.
AFAIK, there's no way around it, short of purchasing a new motherboard, CPU, and putting the new drive in that. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[aquamarineafterglow]

Also, I'd like to add, that I have never done anything like this before. The hardest thing I have ever done to anyone's computer is reformatting. The biggest problem I've ever run into doing that is not being able to delete the partition. So please be patient with me as I have no formal education with doing this and have a limited knowledge of what I'm actually doing. This undertaking is all new in other words. Thanks for being patient....

Aqua

 

[Comtech]

This may be just a little more than you can chew at this point.
First, go to AST's website, and see if you can get their setup utility diskette, download, or contact their tech support for a diskette. You may also find one on the web somewhere, and you MUST have that before you proceed to anything else. You have no other option. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[aquamarineafterglow]

Thank you so much Jim....oh how I love a challenge!!!! I have yet to undertake anything that I couldn't complete, hehehe. I appreciate you heading me in the right direction! It's a start for sure. Thanks so much!

Aqua

 

[Comtech]

Your easiest &quot;fix&quot;, would be to just slave the new drive to the old. This could be a problem if the CD-ROM is currently in that spot.
Check to see if the motherboard has dual IDE controllers, or if it's an IDE controller card with two outputs. If it does/is, then you can put the CD-ROM as slave to her old master hard drive, and put the new hard drive as master on the other IDE.
A BIOS update may also be in order here, so the system can recognize the 10 gig drive. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[aquamarineafterglow]

Jim,

Thanks again, I've already went and got an upgraded bios..after doing some investigation on my own, the bios (cmos) she has is the first one that came out for that computer...they've had nine upgrades since that bios. Like you, I am thinking I may have to do the second option you suggested. From what I've found out, one of the major complaints with this particular computer and the issue of adding another HD was that it only goes up to D: drive. So I'm thinking of seeing about doing the second option as you suggested. I don't wanna go thru all that just to find out I can't properly label all the drives. I've given her the news on this machine and she is willing to let me try it even if it is not successful. I just wanna do it for the learning experience. So, I start tomorrow on this project! I'm very sure this won't be my last post either!!! (LOL) But thank you so much for your help thus far, it's been VERY helpful to me.

Thanks,
Aqua

 

[edfair]

The hardware limitation is 2 IDE devices, not a drive D: limitation. You could add a second IDE controller and expand the limits to 4 IDE devices. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Shad007]

It's been a while and pls forgive me if i'm wrong but AST have proprietary hardware...I believe that the HDD controller cards would not support a 10Gb drive anyway....like some motherboards that won't support xxx amount of ram...

 

[MrMoore]

Hi.
I've had this problem before. Most older computer can only read hard drives that are smaller than 2gb. to correct this problem, hard drive manufactors have their own software that formats the drive for the older computers. Ontrack is a company that handles most of the hard drive software. Go to the web site for your hard drive and you will find the drive software. It will be called easy bios (or something like that). Try this to make it work.

1. creat a boot disk on your customers comuter.
2. boot the computer with CD-ROM Support.
3. after the computer boots, remove the boot disk and insert the hard drive install disk.
4. Change the drive letter to b: and your computer will start to read the floppy.
5. Search for the install program.
6. After starting the install program, the program will ask to update your bios.
7. The rest is self explanitory.

Follow these steps and you will have no problems.

Note: Let me know if this is a Western Digital Hard Drive or if the orginal hard drive is a Western Digital. Western Digital has a very nice Disk Image program that will copy the data from the old drive to the new drive. No need to reinstall anything it does it for you. A great feature.

 

[Comtech]

Mr Moore, good points, but I wasn't getting into that part of it yet, we still need to get the BIOS to &quot;find&quot; a drive of any sort, and actually get the cables hooked up. Once it's physically installed, then EZBios will logically be the next step, although I'm not sure even that's going to work when the BIOS setup is on a hidden partition of the HD, and not onboard.
Myself, I would take the risk of flashing the BIOS with something from a much newer (and therefore much larger HD support) manufacturer, maybe Asus or Abit, Soyo, etc. If it works, you have support, if not, you're out a motherboard, but in a system that old, it's time for an upgrade anyhow. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/