Abit BH6/EIDE

[Kgen]

Hi, I have a (semi-old) motherboard, the Abit BH6 and I wanted to upgrade to a newer EIDE Harddrive, but my motherboard has support for up to 4 IDE Devices and has Ultra DMA/33 bus master. I was just wondering if I could still throw an EIDE HD in there (maybe it would just run slower or something). Any imput would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

WC

 

[braddds]

My last MB was a BH6, had it for three years and placed several hard drives in it over the years. I can assure you it will take "newer EIDE Harddrive's" with no problem. The only kink is that it will only see up to a 60 gig drive - 67 gig to be exact (bios limitation). Check the abit website for any further bios upgrade that will address this problem. Check to see if the drive or the website doesn't come with a utility to fool the computer into seeing larger than a 60 gig drive. Some manufacturer's supply free downloads that address this problem, ie: maxtor has a utility, but has cahnged it to work only with their drives!

Also, if you want to gain the faster disk access/transfer speeds, ie: 66, 100 or 133, you can easily add a "promise" card that will access the drive at it suggested potential. I used the promise66 card for over a year with real benefits to overall system performance. However you'll need the newer 100 or better 133 card for the newest drives. Though I have no first hand experience with the 100 or 133 cards the older 66 was a breeze to install and both windows9x and XP recognized the cards and installed drivers for them (win98 required an upgraded driver from their website but still worked without it until then). Another bonus was that I was able to place more than the 4 drives. With the addition of the promise card I could put on up to 8 drives. Though not usually an issue, I ran burners, cdroms, dvds as well as a couple hard dives, something I couldn't do with just the onboard ide connection!

Sorry for the long post but I hope it answers you question as well as gives insight as to other possiblities.

Braddds

 

[Kgen]

THanks braddds that helps a lot~!

 

[ericmo]

Hi,

I've got an empty box with an Abit BH6 since july. There's only the mother board with 256MB ram, the graphic and the sound cards, without any hard disk. I've upgraded the bios with the last bios available for this motherboard.

I've tried to install an IBM Deskstar 120GXp 60GB. It was seen by the bios, but this one hangs after detection and was not able to boot even on a floppy disk.

I've also tried a Maxtor D740X-6L 60GB. The bios detection was ok and I was able to start an installation of Windows 2000 or Redhat Linux but here the system hangs during installation and I must reset the box.

So I'm interesting to know the bios version you have on your box and the disk models. And if you have an idea of what could be the problem.

Thank's
--
Eric