About Quantum and Maxtor drives

[jwrmt]

I have googled and searched this forum for a couple days now and can't find the answer to my puzzle...I have never encountered anything like this yet and need some help.

I bought, with no software or manuals a Gateway2000 P5-200 (known now as a G5-200) It had been upgraded, it has a Quantum Fireball 2.1AT (2.1GB) HDD and a Maxtor Diamondmax? 5T030H3 (30GB). The BIOS recognizes the first drive, and the second drive, but reports 8GB instead of 30. When WindowsME started (oh the agony) it reported it as a 30GB drive. PowerMax, their HDD utility reported the drive wrong. BIOS reads cyl at 6386? something like that and reports the size wrong, while PowerMax says 59554 cyl...but doesn't report the size. To further confuse matters, Powermax says there is a partition on the drive, while fdisk reads no partition. My girlfriend had been using it for a while, and I bought it from her parents. It has some files on it she wants. My problems started when I formated the 2.1GB in getting ready for Win98SE. Following reliable jumper settings, the 2.1g is set to master, and the second one is set to slave....or so I think. Before I go on...does anyone know of any existing issues like this? Is Gateway so propietary that I have to have both HDD in the computer? What's up?

 

[mainegeek]

jwrmt,
I would probably leave the 2.1 gig out if it were me.

The motherboards rom bios probably has a drive limit of 8gig.

The 30 gig was most likely setup with a drive overlay to get around he bios drive limit of 8gig.

Probably best to set the 30gig as Primary Master and install Win98 on it.

Set the boot order to boot from the CD-Rom drive and then insert the Win98 and boot from it and install Win98.

 

[jwrmt]

yeah. After doing all the searching, I found the answer. I have never used a Mobo that had such an old BIOS...or never had a HDD too large for it to handle. After wrote this, I kept searching, and I decided to check back here...see if I got a response, and boom. One of the other pages I had open searching around on google...I found the answer. I did as you said and now everything is running smoothly. My only concern now... I've never used any drive compression to squeeze mroe space out or overlays...and I feel as if my data on that drive may become corrupt...unless the overlay just feeds instructions to the BIOS with proper info on how to handle the drive....don't know. Can't find more technical info about overlays except for the "use this if your BIOS doesn't support the drive" kind of thing. Anyway, thank you. More patience and I wouldn't have bothered you all with this what now seems to be a simple problem.

 

[edfair]

Overlays are "Alice in Wonderland" programs. When they are good, they are very good. When they are bad, they are very, very bad. Any corruption of the boot sector and your drive becomes unusable unless you have an emergency boot disk with the overlay also loaded.
A better choice would be an add-in controller board with larger drive capability, although at additional cost.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[firewolfrl]

is the Quantum drive a Bigfoot 5.25" Form Factor type drive????

Those drives have lots and lots of problems...from bad sectors to total drive failure.

The only use I have seen that worked for those drives was to use the magnets on the fridge and the platters for under coffee cups. LOL